It was found that one out of every ten users of social commerce faced consumer complaints and damages in Korea and 70% of the damage occurred in food and beverage service.

The Korea Consumer Agency (President: Kim Young-seen, www.kca.go.kr) recently conducted a survey of 1,000 social commerce service users on utilization and customer satisfaction. According to the survey results, 94.1% of the respondents visited social commerce service website more than once every week, while 47.8% of the people surveyed answered that they made a purchase on social commerce website more than once a week.

For damage type (or cause) related to social commerce, the survey participants ranked ‘a discrepancy between a product posted on website and the actual product (50%, 42 persons)’, ‘discrimination against product purchased through non-social commerce channel (47.6%, 40)’, ‘unkindness (31.0%, 26)’, and ‘misleading consumers to purchase other product or services when using social commerce coupons (11.9%, 10)’. (*multiple response accepted)

Facing damages, the most part (41.5%) of the respondents made an inquiry to the social commerce company. Yet, 59.0% (43 persons) of them failed to resolve their complaints. Also, as many as 45 persons (38.1%) of the survey participants responded that they did not take any action for consumer redress. 

Meanwhile, the respondents’ satisfaction with social commerce stood at 3.78 out of 5. And, 85.7% of them expressed their will to continue to use social commerce in the future.

As the KCA expects consumer damages related to social commerce to continue to grow with social commerce transactions revitalizing, it is going to make a recommendation of countermeasures including clear and detailed definition of legal status of social commerce companies to relevant agencies. At present, there is a controversy over whether to apply the Electronic Commerce Consumer Protection Act to social commerce company due to unclear status of those companies in terms of commercial law.   

Date of News Report Release : April 29, 2011