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The Korea Consumer Agency (President: Young-seen Kim, www.kca.go.kr) conducted an analysis on consumer damage related to e-commerce reported to the Agency last year, ‘garments, textile goods, & personal items’ such as clothes, shoes, and bags was the most common item for complaint.
In specific, consumer detriment due to ‘garments, textile goods, & personal items’ took the majority at 35.6% (1,531 cases) out of 4,291 cases of consumer damage related to e-commerce in total, followed by ‘IT services’ and ‘IT equipments’ at 12.2% (524 cases) and 11.4% (488 cases), respectively.
‘Cultural & amusement services’ such as tourism and accommodation services witnessed the highest growth rate y-y of 40.6% (75 cases) y-y.
4,291 consumer redress cases were reported to the KCA in regard to e-commerce last year, taking up 15.6% out of 27,427 consumer detriment cases in total. This is a 5.3% growth y-y compared to 4,076 cases in 2010. Yet, the increasing rate is on a gradual decline since 2009.
※ Growth in number of consumer detriment related to e-commerce: 23.3% (2009) → 7.3% (2010) → 5.3% (2011)
By damage type, ‘contract-related detriment’ such as cooling-off took the lion’s share with 40.9% (1,754 cases), followed by ‘quality/ after-sales service’ and ‘unfair transaction practice of business/ unfair contract’ at 36.6% (1,570 cases) and 18.5% (793 cases), respectively. For value of damage, value less than about US$87 took up 39.8% and damage amount on average stood at US$421 approx.
By gender, men and women took up 52.4% (2,249 cases) and 47.6% (2,042 cases), respectively. And, by age, 68.0% of total victims were at their twenties or thirties at 28.8% (1,235 cases) and 39.2% (1,683 cases).
Based on these findings, the Agency is going to make a recommendation to relevant agencies to put up a notice of sales conditions and standards for handling consumer detriment on a front page of an online shopping mall to assist consumers to easily know basis of claim of consumer right and relevant legal protection.
Also, the Agency made it known that the payment deposit system (escrow), which is currently obligatory on to purchase payment more than US$42, should be applied to transaction value below US$42 as well and disclosure of businesses causing frequent consumer damage is necessary.
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