The thing I wonder about their status as a top competitor: how different would their status be in a less restrictive market?

How does Alipay's user experience compare to Paypal's? Is it the lack of competition that has enabled them to expand their reach so widely (by not having to focus so much effort on each venture)? For example, the experience of shopping on AliExpress is (imo) sub-par when compared to most Western online shopping experiences I've had (Amazon, Zappos, and even smaller retailers).

I don't know a whole ton about the Eastern market to be honest, so I'm open to being educated.

My experience: using paypal is so confusing for me, compared to alipay. And ebay makes you uncomfortable and doubting your purchase decision more than taobao.

I think it partially explains Alibaba's success in China. how you do shopping and paying is very much dependent on the "tradition" and regulation environment, and a local company can optimize that better than a global one.

Aliexpress is a mess though, i agree with that. But I think the language barrier faced by the shop owners there may be the biggest problem.

Fraud is so rampant, that all of Paypal's competitors were either more worrisome or got defrauded to death. Paypal found the very narrow area where you can be careful enough to be profitable without chasing away all of your customers.

see my reply to 'dengnan. Alipay has users' trust and to them it isn't a terrible experience. Alipay is a bit different than Paypal in the way it integrates with your Taobao purchases. Alipay, at least for Taobao purchases, acts as an escrow agent and is or at least was strongly aligned with the buyer. Paypal has/had a history of generally siding with buyer grievances but the mechanisms of this trust is different enough that Alipay's solution is tailored to the problem effectively.

To your question "Is it the lack of competition..." I would say this is not the case. There has been plenty of competition. Alipay grew its adoption on its integration with Taobao in similar ways as PayPal was integrated with eBay.

In fairness the scale goes the other way too - some of these are stated to be quite minor stakes in the article while Google fully own everything mentioned by the parent (except Uber, but Lyft is an example Alibaba don't own outright)