The Indian online retailer Paytm has announced it will place its China headquarters in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, following in the footsteps of cross-border e-commerce giants such as Amazon, Google and Wish.

Paytm, the largest Indian mobile payment platform, began cross-border e-commerce in 2016. It soon gathered some 140,000 sellers offering more than 68 million kinds of products, ranging from electronics to furniture and garments, 40 percent of which are from China.

The decision to bring Paytm Mall to Hangzhou was a no-brainer for Paytm founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma who made the announcement at a ceremony on June 29. The region is home to a multitude of Internet companies including Alibaba group, the biggest stakeholder in Paytm parent company One97 Communications.

According to Sharma, the founding of Paytm in 2010 was inspired by Alibaba, which had brought enormous change and convenience to Chinese people with the e-commerce platform taobao.com and mobile payment tool Alipay.

With big support from the Hangzhou government, Sharma is optimistic about Paytm's growth in China, revealing that Paytm will open a R&D center in Hangzhou in the near future.

"We hope that through Paytm, more Chinese manufactures and online vendors will sell their products to Indian buyers more easily," he said.

Hangzhou has been increasingly keen on cross-border online business this year. A total of 234 cross-border e-commerce companies have settled in the city between January and May 2017, with a registered capital of up to nearly 1.6 billion yuan ($235 million).