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Among online shopping malls with their business base outside Seoul, only 62.2% malls were found to provide services for safe purchase. Also, 61.9% failed to fully guarantee consumers’ cooling-off rights by showing consumers’ cooling-off right without legal accuracy or omitting the indication of the right.
These facts were found by the Korea Consumer Agency (President: Kim Young-seen, www.kca.go.kr) and Consumers Union of Korea (President: Jung Gwang-mo) through joint monitoring 10,454 shopping malls registered as online marketing business in eight local governments (Busan, Daegu, Daejeon, Incheon, Gwangju, Ulsan, Gyeonggi, & Gangwon) during March 30 ~ June 16, 2010.
Out of the 10,454 shopping malls, only 4,775 (45.7%) malls were in business. Among the 4,552 online shopping malls, 62.2% malls offer safe transaction devices such as the Escrow system, which is mandatory at time of e-commerce transaction of goods worth more than W100,000, whereas 37.8% malls fail to offer those services, leading to high probability for consumer damages.
Also, 61.9% online shopping malls were found to fail to guarantee consumers’ cooling-off right by 1) restricting cooling-off period to ‘within six days’ from ‘seven days guaranteed by law’ (29.4%); 2) setting a limit to items for cooling-off right (10.5%); 3) citing that the cooling-off cannot possibly be done (12.9%); or 4) omitting the indication of the right (9.1%).
The Monitoring also found that 33.4% of the businesses fail to post up the same information about the business operator as they are registered to local government. The biggest discrepancy was found for ‘Notification number for telemarketing business (42.8%)’, followed by ‘Address (41.4%)’, ‘Domain (31.1%)’. ‘Name of the representative (23.7%)’, and ‘Business registration number (22.7%).
Based on these results, the KCA plans to make a recommendation of correcting the identified problems in a voluntary manner to the appropriate businesses. In addition, the Agency is going to make a suggestion of management and supervision to the appropriate local government when the businesses in question fail to carry out the corrective measures. Meanwhile, the Agency calls on consumers to confirm whether an online shopping mall provides the Escrow system and cooling-off right at time of purchase.
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