In Double Eleven, there are multiple routines and consumer protection cannot be just watched out

  Spotlight

  Goodness lies in co-governance, no single tree can make a forest, no one can serve the crowd.

  It's Double Eleven again a year, and it's another round of "chop hands" to buy, buy and buy.

The China Consumers Association recently issued a document to remind consumers to beware of various promotional routines, including more slots for live broadcasts, more moisture in promotional activities, more product quality problems, more after-sales service criticism, more violations of order contracts, and more harassment of promotional advertisements.

  The China Consumers Association has said all the routines that should be said, but why are there still many routines every year?

In terms of consumer protection, we need to go further and do more.

In the anti-routine battlefield of Double Eleven, only consumers can fight alone.

For merchants, we need to show more sincerity to make products have a tangible price-performance ratio. This is for the sake of consumers and the merchants' own brand.

  Why are the discounts on Double Eleven more and more complicated?

On the one hand, merchants are afraid that transparent price information will lead to price wars among homogeneous merchants. Convenient price comparison makes it easy for users to exclude low cost-effective products, thereby reducing merchant profits.

On the other hand, considering that there are some "price insensitive people" among customers, merchants believe that they can get higher profits from them.

  As a result, the design of Double Eleven discounts is becoming more and more complicated year by year. Whether it’s the prepaid deposit gameplay, the first price increase and then the price reduction, and the use of various restricted uses and limited quota coupons, customers are often tired, and merchants are also tired. Very tired, increasing the time and cost of both parties.

The development of Internet technology, or the essence of e-commerce development, should be to remove these transaction costs.

Due to merchants’ complex preferential promotion methods, advances in Internet technology have not brought benefits to everyone and reduced intermediate transaction costs, but have supported many industries such as the order-swiping industry and third-party price comparison websites.

Therefore, merchants produce "spears" and "shields" at the same time, while making them more and more complicated, and at the same time "recharging" these additional industries.

  The simplification of complex things is to provide value, and it is meaningless "consumption" to make simple things complicated.

Merchants should realize that many brands use stable price-performance expectations to gain market access, and price transparency is the general trend.

And many international brands maintain brand tonality by maintaining the uniformity of prices.

  Consumers can be divided into two categories: price-sensitive and price-insensitive. This is a natural classification. Many people don't care about infringement of their rights, and they think they are unlucky when they buy fake products.

Consumer protection also requires consumers to make efforts to protect their rights.

Some businesses use big data to profile consumers, use quality sensitivity to analyze consumers qualitatively, and treat them differently when shipping.

In the era of big data, this exists.

Maintaining one's own interests is the best deterrent for businesses, and this deterrence is not just for individuals. To a certain extent, this kind of consumer-led, bottom-up supervision is the main means of regulating the market.

  From the perspective of the overall environment, China's manufacturing industry is very strong, but Chinese brands are not loud enough. We must encourage domestic brands to work hard on quality instead of setting more routines on sales promotion.

Hunger marketing and promotional routines are both unsustainable brand development models.

You get what you pay for, and you can build a century-old horn without deception.

Promotional chaos on Double Eleven requires merchants to do more for brands and simplify complicated routines, as well as regulators, such as consumer associations and the media. In addition, logistics companies are required to protect personal information transmitted in logistics, and communications operators are required to make efforts. Maintain the security of personal information and consumers have the consciousness to safeguard their own rights.

Therefore, goodness lies in co-governance, a tree does not make a forest, and one person does not serve the crowd.

  Pan Helin (Executive Dean and Professor of the Institute of Digital Economy, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law)