China's
March 15th World Consumer Rights Day focused to an unprecedented extent on
complaints from the e-commerce space. According to a report analyzing China e-commerce related complaints released by the China ecommerce Research Center (CECRC) in mid-March, the total number of complaints rose 3.3% YoY to over 100,000 in 2014. Online shopping was the top target for consumer complaints in each month of 2012, accounting for 47.6% of total complaints. Offline-to-online (O2O) and mobile e-commerce ranked 2nd and 3rd with 24.2% and 12.4% of total complaints. Notably, 2014 witnessed a surge in complaints on the internet finance front, likely reflecting among other things the fact that legislation currently is lagging behind industry
evolution in this segment.
According to the CECRC, unreasonable returns and replacement policies, difficulties in obtaining refunds, and counterfeit products & fraud were the three main areas of complaints for consumers in using e-commerce and Internet services in 2014, representing 16.4%, 13.5% and 11.7% of total complaints received, respectively. The rise in complaints around unsatisfactory returns and replacement policies (+6.3% YoY) may have been aided by the more intensive enforcement of the amended ?Law of PRC on Protection of Consumer Rights and Interests? act of March 2014. The law mandates that an internet-based business is required to entitle the consumer to hassle-free returns within 7 days of the receipt of the product. The number of counterfeit product & fraud-related complaints remained at high levels last year, and did not see any marked improvement.
CECRC also disclosed the top 10 most successful online retailers in customer satisfaction, as well as the 10 lowest scorers. JD was selected as the top online retailer, followed by Jumei and Suning.com. By contrast, Taobao* marketplace (the C2C platform) saw the lowest ranking, with Dangdang and Xiaomi marketplace placing just above it. China's B2C players generally deliver better service levels and faster complaint response times, and lead in various other metrics, over their C2C counterparts.
