We did not have an Alipay account and we purchased weekly for 3 plus years without issue.

These days, you can do direct payment via bank transfer.

I didn't feel comfortable with direct payment so we used a third party payment processor (name escapes me at the moment). We send x dollars of money to this account then send all our taobao payments via this account. When money gets low, we transfer from our bank another bit of money.

We were never burned. Once they shipped us avocados that were too ripe and they reshipped with in 24 hours. Ended up having fresh guacamole for an extra week.