Stripe today announced on its blog that it will give its merchant customers the ability to accept payments from consumers using Alipay, which is a third-party payment platform in China. 

"You won't need to change your integration: once you enable Alipay in your dashboard, Chinese customers will see it as a payment option in Checkout," Stripe's Christian Anderson wrote on the blog. "(On a technical level, both credit cards and Alipay will give you a normal token for charging or for attaching to a customer.) Similarly, earnings from Alipay will be included in your existing daily deposit. Recurring payments will work normally too. We think that having a unified set of APIs is very important: dealing with a plethora of different payment methods would quickly become unmanageable." 

Alipay users will enter their email address and a six-digit SMS code to confirm their purchase, Anderson wrote. Stripe will roll out Alipay support to all its merchants in the coming weeks.