Alipay, a leading Chinese third-party payment platform. [Photo/Xinhua]

Alipay will start to charge users a fee when they make transfers from their account balance to their debit cards, following a similar move by rival Tencent's WeChat Pay earlier this year.

Alibaba's popular online payment affiliate said the fee will start from October 12. Each Alipay user will have a one-time free allowance of 20,000 yuan (US$2,985) before the 0.1 percent fee is levied on the total transfer amount. The minimum charge is 0.1 yuan each time.

Alipay said in an e-mail statement on Monday that the move to charge the fee is to offset the rising business operation costs. But it said most users are unlikely to have to pay the fee because of the high allowance.

The new rule only affects individual users and does not apply to Taobao vendors or offline merchants that use Alipay to collect payment from buyers.

Alipay also said that users can continue to transfer funds free of charge in their Alipay account to Yu'E Bao, the popular cash management product by Tianhong Fund.

Users can also earn Alipay reward points by making online or offline payments and use the points to offset the transfer fee, with each point equivalent to one yuan of transfer amount not subject to the transfer fee.

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