Colin Rule, who set up eBay’s system, said the company experimented with a community court in India about a decade ago. The pilot program was unsuccessful, but he said that a presentation on the system in Hong Kong caught Alibaba’s attention, and may have helped inspire what is likely to be the original program. First large-scale online examiner.
In 2012, Alibaba’s Taobao shopping platform introduced a kind of “people’s court”—Officially the platform’s User Dispute Resolution Center — to handle customer complaints about shoddy or pirated products as well as complaints that a user has been harassed by the platform unfairly punished. A jury of 31 unpaid volunteers — buyers and sellers who have been using the site for at least three months and have their names verified — decided the cases by majority vote. simple.
Alibaba said Taobao no longer uses the system for user disputes and that its customer service department will manage those complaints. But a similar program exists on the company’s second-hand market, Xianyu. Seventeen anonymous users weigh in on disagreements, for example, over whether a seller accurately describes wear and tear on a used handbag. Solve system 95 percent of customer disputes, according to research published by Alibaba last year.
Customers on Chinese markets often pay with digital wallets, which don’t have the kind of purchase protection that credit card companies offer. Instead, Alibaba’s e-commerce sites – like many across Asia – are based on an escrow model: Buyers pay in the marketplace, and funds are transferred to sellers only after the buyer’s purchase. confirm that they have received the satisfactory product.
“This is a way to design a trading system where you don’t need consumer protection, because the buyer has control over the long haul,” said Rule, a former eBay executive. . When a seller opens a store on Taobao, they must provide a deposit, which can be used to refund the buyer. Sellers must comply with dispute resolution decisions to continue using the platform, but they can appeal the decision or take the case to a government-run court.
In 2018, Tencent’s chat application and service WeChat introduced a peer-review system to combat Xigao, a method that is easily translated as “article washing”—just record an article and make it your own, a method violate the platform’s standards of conduct, if not the law. Someone who believes their work has been copied can file a complaint, pointing out things like structural similarities or repeating words from the subject line. Both sides obey their argumentand volunteers, experienced content creators on WeChat, are very interested. If at least 70% of the board considers that a wash has occurred, the offending post will be removed and replaced with the original author’s post.
Until recently, large companies were largely free to create these systems, often with the tacit consent of the authorities, Georgetown’s Liu said. Online services are vital to the development of China’s economy, and the bureaucracy can be slow to innovate due to vested interests and conflicting priorities.
Now, however, “public regulations are catching up,” she said. Country e-commerce law, which went into effect in 2019, requires companies to respond quickly to consumer complaints and holds them accountable for counterfeit goods sold on their platforms.
