Chinese third-party Internet payment platform Alipay has announced that it will start to collect a certain proportion of service charges from users with large-scale trading and the new policy will take effect from January 1, 2009.

At the same time, the company promises to continue to provide free services to ordinary users.

According to the report published by Alipay, which is owned by Internet B2B company Alibaba, it will offer a monthly CNY5,000 free trading volume to each user. For those whose actual trading volume exceeds the specified amount, Alipay will charge service fees at a certain proportion. The report adds that users who select and buy products on the company's sister auction website Taobao.com and complete the transaction via Alipay are not included in the new policy, which means they still do not need to pay any service fee. The new policy is only effective on transactions completed within the website of Alipay.

Statistics from Alipay show that the number of users who complete more than CNY5,000 trading on Alipay accounts for less than 0.01% of its total users. Therefore, to collect certain service fees from this special group of people will not affect Alipay's 99.99% ordinary users.

Alipay previously announced that by the end of August 2008, the number of its registered users had hit over 100 million, making it the world's second largest third-party payment platform, which was only second to the U.S.-based Paypal with 180 million users.