China’s name-and-shame consumer TV show turns its wrath on websites
Platforms offering food delivery and used cars singled out by annual investigative programme
China’s flourishing e-commerce platforms topped the shame list on state television’s annual programme to mark World Consumer Rights Day on Tuesday.
Brands targeted by the CCTV show included the fast-growing websites of food-ordering platform Ele.me, and Cheyipai.com, a used car trading service.
The investigative news show, which has been broadcast on the consumer rights day for 26 years, is awaited with dread by companies operating on the mainland because most of the show’s allegations are followed by government action.
Ele.me was accused of partnering with unlicensed restaurants, mostly home kitchens with poor sanitary conditions.
They allegedly posted false pictures and addresses on the website to mislead customers. Only the deliverymen would be given the true location of the food pick-up.
READ MORE: Chinese consumer rights show slams foreign firms’ ‘inferior cars’
The show said Cheyipai.com had created two different systems to take advantage of sellers who entrusted their car to middlemen. The seller might see a price of 70,000 yuan (HK$83,500) in their system, but the price offered by the buyer in thebuyers’ system might be 73,000 yuan, with the difference going to the middlemen.
Instead of the big international brands targeted in previous years, the show focused on domestic firms.
Besides the two mentioned above, it accused publicly listed Daoyoudao, a mobile app developer, of creating software that maliciously charged users.
Other areas said to be problematic included the leak of user information by online-to-offline service platforms and the rampant click farms that allow businesses to seem more popular than they actually are.
READ MORE: Why scammed consumers in China are shunning their right to fight for compensation
But it wasn’t all bad for local companies. The programme warned that mainlanders’ love of buying goods from overseas through the internet might be a bit misguided.
According to the state quality inspection administration, 33 per cent of 654 batches of children’s products bought from cross-border e-commerce websites, including toys and clothing, failed to meet quality standards.
CCTV said the programme had received numerous complaints from consumers across the country in the past year.
A quarter were related to online shopping. Platforms Taobao and JD were both slammed, and emerging online shops on the social media platform WeChat were also named.
Sales of cars and mobile phones were the most problematic, it said.
After years of taking a drubbing, companies have tried to take a proactive approach to the ritual.
Taobao, for instance, is widely criticised for the sale of counterfeit goods but its parent company Alibaba said ahead of the day that it was stepping up enforcement.
In a speech to its “counter-fake” task force earlier this week, group chairman Jack Ma vowed to recruit 300 more people, saying there was no spending limit on tackling the problem. “Today it’s easy to kill Alibaba, but it’s difficult to eliminate fake goods,” he was quoted by media as saying.
