[Feature] we should support ALiPay

[LisaHusband]

🚀 Feature Title

support ALiPay

❓ What problem does this solve?

They who those base in china mainland can’t accept bounty , and ALiPay can do it, because ALiPay is legal for accept bounty in china mainland

💡 Proposed Solution

add support ALiPay as Payment method

🔁 Alternatives Considered

No response

🎨 Does this feature affect the UI?

Yes

🖼️ UI Mockup / Screenshot (if applicable)

No response

🛠️ Technical Notes (if any)

No response

💰 Is there a bounty for this issue?

Yes

💵 Bounty Amount (if any)

No response

📜 Bounty Details (if applicable)

No response

[alexanmtz]

Thanks for the suggestion, @LisaHusband. We will investigate this.

[LisaHusband]

@alexanmtz
Another approach is to support PayPal more comprehensively. PayPal itself supports a global multi-currency and multi-country payment system. Is it possible to allow users to use PayPal to receive bounties from banks or credit cards? This eliminates the need to register or link a bank account in the corresponding currency, and the associated 8% bank transfer fees. Technically, supporting bank account transfers via PayPal doesn't seem complicated. All it requires is an official bank account supporting multiple currencies as a transfer agent, connected to PayPal's API, and you're good to go.

[LisaHusband]

And I would like to contribute to both of these approaches.

[alexanmtz]

Thanks @LisaHusband for the suggestion, but it's a little more complicated than that :)

PayPal, in our experience, is not a good payment method compared with Stripe, and we are facing many challenges in supporting it.

To ilustrate our situation: now our PayPal payouts are pending because they once again require some information (they ask for that so many times), which we provided but while we wait to them to review the information, the transactions are on hold, and they have a really bad support, mostly using AI agents and as they say that it takes two business days, it's been already 2 weeks with no response from them. This is causing delays in our Payouts.

Having a direct bank transfer with a custom Stripe integration helps us to avoid any third-party fees, like PayPal. The 8% bank transfer is our platform fee to cover our costs.

We have challenges supporting cross-payments between Stripe's regular bank account and PayPal. As a result, we now only pay bounties based on the source. If the bounty was funded with PayPal, you can receive it with PayPal. Otherwise, you need a bank account, and unfortunately, China is not supported on Stripe yet or AliPay wallets. To accept both solutions widely, we would have to transfer payments from Stripe to our bank account, and then transfer to PayPal Wallet, and then we could payout, which would increase our fee and tax obligations that we want to avoid. Still, we have been considering that, and it will result in a higher fee if you opt for that way, but at least you would be able to get the payout in countries not supported by Stripe and with a PayPal account.

And now I do not even consider this approach while PayPal is requiring us to provide the information that we provided, but then stops our business and delays our Payouts to contributors.

I was looking into alternatives like https://www.airwallex.com/, which supports payments to China.

[LisaHusband]

Thanks for your reply, but Alipay may be a simpler way for this application scenario. 😃