E-commerce give buyers a better shopping experience with more diverse choices.

The strong growth of e-commerce is shaping the shopping habits of consumers and providing them with greater convenience.

E-commerce makes it easier and more cost-efficient for sellers to reach their customers than traditional business methods, while also giving buyers a better shopping experience with more diverse choices in terms of both quality and price. However, according to regulators, managing and punishing violations in the online space are much more difficult because this new form of commerce has different characteristics and involves many potential risks.

In 2023, market regulators nationwide undertook inquiries into 834 cases and found violations in 764 cases, imposing fines of 12 billion VND (480,000 USD). Violations mainly involve the trading of contraband, counterfeit goods, pirated goods, and goods with unclear origin.

It is worth noting that some sellers post information or livestream in one place but their warehouses are located elsewhere.

For prohibited goods, the sellers split their products into smaller parts and trade by entering into agreements in secret groups. They then put their products onto e-commerce platforms to take advantage of delivery services. Another method is posting a single product link on dozens of different fan pages and after several orders were completed on a page, such pages will be deleted to remove their traces.

With such complexities, online trading has caused significant difficulty for the functional authorities regarding tracking, inspection, and issuing fines.

Therefore, in order to protect the interests of consumers in online shopping, the functional forces, especially in market surveillance, need to regularly inspect the activities that utilise e-commerce to sell fake goods or goods with no clear origin.

It is also necessary to renovate coordination between different agencies to radically prevent counterfeit and smuggled goods in the online space, enhance the management of transactions between sellers and buyers, and supervise the goods with signs of violations.

More importantly, the prevention of violations in the cyberspace should be regarded as not only the task of the industry and trade authorities, but also a responsibility of the whole society.

Manufacturing enterprises need to enhance awareness in protecting themselves, watch the market closely to promptly discover signs of violations, and report any incidents to the functional agencies.

For their part, e-commerce platforms need to enhance their responsibility in filtering and banning accounts that do not provide complete information and strictly punish violators. In the meantime, consumer protection agencies should work together and frequently hold activities to enhance consumers’ knowledge in online shopping and issue guidance on how to avoid fraud.

Once the abovementioned measures are taken, each person will be a smart consumer with knowledge on how to protect themselves when shopping online./.