LOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) — Someday soon, buying items online may require you to smile before paying, no matter how high the price. At least, this is where Alibaba Group Holdings Inc.’s new technology seeks to lead us.

Earlier this week, Alibaba BABA, -1.20% founder and Chairman Jack Ma unveiled the company’s “Smile to Pay” system, which will allow users to confirm their identity by face-recognition technology rather than with passwords or other digital tokens.

Ma showed off the new system in a presentation at the opening of the CeBit technology conference in Hanover, Germany, taking a selfie with his phone to pay for a vintage stamp offered on Alibaba’s e-commerce site, according to reports.

The application compared the photo to a stored image of Ma linked to his account and, after confirming that the picture was of the same person, authorized the payment.

Of course, this technology would require safety features — such as a way to make sure the picture is of a real person and not a stolen photo — and a South China Morning Post report Tuesday about Smile to Pay noted past efforts at face recognition have been plagued by bugs.

But the report quoted an Alibaba spokeswoman as saying the company was “quite serious” about developing Smile to Pay. No launch date has yet been set, but the e-commerce major plans to offer the system in China first, before introducing it elsewhere, the South China Morning Post said.

Alibaba said its financial arm, Ant Financial, was developing Smile to Pay.

Meanwhile, a separate report by CNBC said Alibaba was looking at other biometric verification systems, such as using voice recognition, as well as technology that could confirm identities “by scanning something like a tattoo or even a pet.”