Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. added arch rival Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s payment service WeChat Pay to a number of its apps. Thus, Alibaba’s luxury goods app Kaola, e-book app Shuqi, and food delivery app Ele.me can now accept payments from WeChat Pay which is one of the most extensively used online payment options in China. Other prominent apps of Alibaba like Xianyu, a used-goods marketplace app and Freshippo, a supermarket app have also applied for WeChat Pay integration, providing a quick and seamless payment experience to its customers.

This majorly came after the government ordered the established tech companies to refrain from blocking their rival’s services and links. These hostile practices significantly curbed the app users to conveniently switch to different services between the rival companies. Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s messaging app WeChat did not allow its users to browse through and access links to rival platforms, and hence they prohibited their users to click on links of other competitive sites that were sent via chat, such as Alibaba’s luxury goods listings on Kaola. Hence, the ability of a seamless customer experience was hindered at the cost of maintaining the competitive landscape and rivalries. Therefore, the matter was anticipated to be eased up after the stringent measure taken by the government. As a result of this, WeChat then started allowing users to access links to rival platforms for the first time in years. This came up as major concession to the strict regulatory pressure.

China’s dominant technology regulator warned established internet firms to stop blocking links to rival services in order to serve as a part of a broader campaign to limit their surging monopoly power over data and provide an immaculate customer experience. The government has already accused a number of companies of unethically vanquishing the competition in their area, most recently being ByteDance in video via TikTok-cousin Douyin.

Earlier this year in April, the antitrust regulators fined Alibaba a record $2.75 billion for anti-competitive behavior. Thus, the dignified authorities in the China are incessantly tightening regulations in the internet sector.