Walking the last mile of business digitalization

Liu Wenfeng and his wife have been selling vegetables in Wen'er vegetable market in Hangzhou for years. Like the other 279 stall owners in the market, he gets up around 2 am to source products from upstream suppliers, selling a wide variety of vegetables and winding up his day's business only around 7:30 pm.

Throughout the day he deals with customers and handles payments. But until recently, he received the payments in currency notes and coins. In the past, Liu said, he would occasionally receive fake bills, and found out they were fakes only later in the day and thus had to bear the loss. But thanks to the mobile payment boom and a QR code, his business has changed.

"Customers now scan my Alipay QR code to make payments. It saves me a lot of time. And now I don't have to bother about returning the change or worry about fake bills," Liu said, adding that he can be more focused on serving customers and let the payment transaction be handled by Alipay.