ByteDance has unveiled its payment service for the Chinese version of the video app TikTok, called “Douyin Pay” on Tuesday, January 19. The move is a good step forward as it continues to expand into previously uncharted territory in the e-commerce business segment of the Chinese market.

In a statement it released to the public, Douyin said that Douyin Pay will supplement existing payment options while at the same time it pursues establishing a superior customer experience for users of the alternative payment platform.

With more than half a billion daily users of its platform, Douyin is now adding Douyin Pay to Alipay and WeChat Pay, which were the payment platforms previously available for users who may want to pay for any of the numerous goods and services on offer on the platform.

ByteDance got a foothold on the payment service in China when its founder and CEO, Zhang Yiming acquired Wuhan Hezhong Yibao Technology Co in 2020. Hezhong Yibao, at the time of its acquisition, already had a third-party payment license from the Chinese Central Bank in 2014.

ByteDance has had some taste of almost out gone US President, Donald Trump administration’s seeming harsh stance against Chinese businesses, as it had been directed to divest TikTok’s U.S. assets due to national security threats.

ByteDance insists that it is not a security threat, and continues to deny the allegations. The company has had discussions with Walmart and Oracle to move part of its assets into a new and untainted company.

Douyin is the main revenue source for ByteDance and gives us an inkling of what TikTok could metamorphose into. Douyin began sales of merchandise four years ago and is now operating a thriving e-commerce platform where over 600 million users do their online shopping daily.

ByteDance’s expansion coincides with a tightening of regulations and oversight functions by China’s financial regulators to prevent monopolistic tendencies in the mobile payment segment of the financial services architecture.

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Our previous report had heralded the success achieved by Chinese short-video content platform TikTok and its Chinese equivalent Douyin in 2019. The app dethroned Facebook to slide behind Whatsapp as the most-downloaded app last year. This year, the popularity of the short-video app continues to soar. Recent data released by Sensor Tower shows that Douyin and TikTok were downloaded 104 million times on the Google Playstore and Apple app store.

The latest data shows that the app surpassed WhatsApp as the world’s most downloaded mobile app in the month under reference. The figure represents a massive 46% increase over the same period last year and an impressive 27% increase when compared to the total downloads in December 2019.

The stats show that the top three markets for TikTok downloads during this period are India, Brazil and the United States each accounting for 34.4%, 10.4% and 7.3%, respectively. Thus, the figure could even be higher as it doesn’t include downloads on third-party Android platforms in China and other regions.

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At present, the total download of the application has exceeded 1.82 billion times. From a trend perspective, the download volume in February is expected to reach a new high, and the demographic dividend of overseas emerging markets will support TikTok to maintain rapid growth.

In terms of in-app purchase revenue, Douyin and TikTok ’s global revenue in December soared to $ 39.4 million but fell to $ 28.6 million in January. The revenue still ranks as the third-highest revenue-generating month after December and November 2019. At present, in-app purchase revenue is mainly from China and the United States, accounting for 84.5% and 10.1% of total revenue in January, respectively.

The Chinese version Duoyin at first saw a decline in its in-app purchases in early January but quickly rebounded when the Spring festival holidays began on January 23. Duoyin’s in-app purchases were said to be 18.7 times higher than the revenue during the Spring Festival  2019. This may be due to the Coronavirus which meant more persons were at home and spent time with their smartphones and other electronic gadgets. TV viewership was earlier revealed to have reached an all-time high during the holidays due to the coronavirus outbreak.

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