Alibaba offers three payment paths once a supplier creates an order, and they are not price-equivalent even though Alibaba Trade Assurance Vetting protection is identical across all of them:
Because a bank-direct USD wire is only cheap in theory, the practical way to capture the international-wire discount without owning a USD account is to route the wire amount through a currency-conversion intermediary — see Wise.com Alibaba Payment Routing (Currency-Arbitrage Method), which quoted £4,393 for the same $5,838 order, undercutting both card and domestic transfer.
The method chosen does not change buyer protection: Trade Assurance coverage applies equally to card, domestic transfer, and international transfer, as long as the supplier is enrolled.
Converting Alibaba's quoted international-wire amount ($5,838 in one example) through a generic currency converter yields roughly £4,373 — below what any of Alibaba's own payment routes (card, domestic transfer, or direct international wire) charge for the same order. This gap is the basis for treating Alibaba's card-payment route in particular as carrying an outsized embedded markup. Domestic transfer barely beats card despite avoiding cross-currency conversion (£4,415 vs £4,552), suggesting the markup sits in Alibaba's payment processing itself rather than in currency conversion. See Wise.com Alibaba Payment Routing (Currency-Arbitrage Method) for the workaround that captures this gap instead of paying it to Alibaba.