China Post has signed a product agreement and a strategic cooperation framework agreement on e-commerce with B2B service operator Alibaba.
The parties will work on the three most important sectors of e-commerce: logistics, fund flow and information flow.
On logistics, they will launch a special logistics tool called "eYoubao" for individual users, which, according to Lu Zhaoxi, vice president of Alibaba, can reduce the goods delivery fees by 50% compared with EMS.
Regarding fund flow, they will break up the limit that only bank card holders can conduct online payment and make it possible for China Post's Green Card holders and other users to complete payment via Alibaba's Alipay.
The process of information flow has also been made easier with users' goods information transmitted to the post office through Alipay and the latter fetching the goods directly according to the information received.
Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba says that through this cooperation, their Alipay service can be extended to the rural areas of China. Lu estimates, optimistically, that Alibaba's Taobao.com will receive over 100,000 orders each day in a year after the cooperation.