Alibaba Introduces Buy Now Pay Later to Boost Sales; Third-Party Apps Nixed on Musk’s Twitter

by Hannah Dillon on 17th Jan 2023 in News

In today's ExchangeWire news digest: Alibaba offers Buy Now Pay Later to European customers; Musk's Twitter is believed to have intentionally broken third-party apps to the site; and Indian unicorn ShareChat culls its workforce against economic headwinds.

Alibaba offers BNPL in Europe

E-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding now offers its European customers the option to pay for products after receiving them. The development signals the latest effort from the company to boost sales abroad as growth in China slows.

On Monday (16th January) fintech company Splitit Payments announced it would pair with Ant Group Co.’s Alipay to deliver a BNPL option on AliExpress, an Alibaba-run online marketplace for customers outside of China.

Third-party apps broken on Twitter

Developers have voiced their frustration at Elon Musk’s Twitter, which may have intentionally broken third-party apps for accessing the site.

For years, Twitter has permitted site access through a variety of platforms, most of which are made by third-party developers. However, as of last week, this functionality has stopped on some of the biggest third-party apps, with reports suggesting this was an intentional decision by CEO Elon Musk.

ShareChat culls staff by about 20%

India’s ShareChat has cut about a fifth of its workforce as it attempts to reduce costs against global headwinds. The move from the unicorn comes just one month after it shut down its online gaming platform Jeet11, laying off almost 100 employees.

In an internal memo, ShareChat CEO Ankush Sachdeva told employees, “There is a growing market consensus that the current global economic downturn would be a much more sustained one, and we thus have to, unfortunately, seek more cost savings by reducing our team size”.