Alipay ties with Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten

Alipay, the popular third-party payment service affiliated with China's Alibaba Group, on Monday announced a tie-up with Japan's leading e-commerce company Rakuten.

About 250 shops under Rakuten Global Market, Rakuten's international shopping service, started accepting payment by Alipay last week.

About 10,000 of the shops will eventually accept Alipay payments.

Rakuten is the latest Japanese e-commerce platform to cooperate with Alipay following Yahoo Japan, which announced a week earlier that it planned to use Alipay as another payment option for customers from June.

Shopping on Japanese e-commerce platforms is booming in China with the continuous depreciation of the Japanese currency yen.

Alipay has been going global in recent years. It has reached agreements with international e-commerce companies including iherb.com, a U.S. nutritional supplements company, Forever 21, an American multi-channel apparel retailer and Wiggle, the UK's leading online cycling retailer.

The Rakuten deal comes as Alibaba prepares for its American IPO.

Alibaba dominates China's e-commerce market. Its shopping sites handle more transactions than those of Amazon.com and eBay combined.