This year's singles' day sales opened in a grand manner once again.

The penetration rate of online shopping has reached its peak, and the e-commerce sales no longer show a steady rise. Every year on singles' day, everyone feels that it is not as lively as before, and the discounts are not as good as they used to be.

However, it doesn't prevent both consumers and merchants from considering singles' day as the most important shopping festival of the year, unparalleled by any other.

While ordinary consumers diligently seek discounts, there is a group of parasites lurking above them, exploiting platform loopholes and engaging in grey industries.

01

The comedic skit on the 1999 Spring Festival Gala, featuring white clouds and black soil, popularized the term 'lamb fleece' for the past 20 years.

Nowadays, when shopping online, you have to find discounts, and when ordering takeout, you have to collect coupons. In every aspect of life, there is always a pursuit for small benefits.

Capitalists benefit from speculating in the market, while consumers seek small benefits, without disturbing each other, which is actually not a big problem.

But the activities of small benefit seekers disrupt this balance.

The term "small benefit seekers" has been around for a long time, but in the beginning, it wasn't so controversial.

As early as ten years ago, the "small benefit seekers" achieved a feat of outsmarting Lenovo for over a billion in one night.

At that time, due to a system error in the official Lenovo back-end store, the price of a Lenovo tablet originally priced at 1888 yuan was mistakenly marked as 999 yuan. In just a few hours, the small benefit seekers placed orders for 0.11 million units.

As a large company, Lenovo had to accept the incident and ship the products, resulting in a loss of over a billion yuan.

In 2018, Starbucks launched the "Starbucks APP New User Registry Gift" event. The small benefit seekers quickly registered a bunch of fake accounts and exhausted all the coupons overnight, causing Starbucks to quickly take down the activity, eventually resulting in a loss of millions.

In 2019, pdd holdings appeared a system vulnerability, allowing users to receive 100 yuan shopping vouchers without any threshold. The bargain hunters took action in the middle of the night until discovered. Pdd holdings had already had tens of millions of vouchers stolen.

I didn't catch any of these bargains.

But looking at the entire group of bargain hunters, these scammers who only fleece big companies should even be called 'youdao thieves'.

Because they target only large companies, large platforms, even if problems arise, big companies can basically handle it.

But what's disgusting is that many bargain hunters have reached out to small merchants and small companies.

In the early years, there was an online store called Italian Fox, 6 pairs of shoes were mistakenly marked at over 100 yuan due to a system bug. The bargain hunters snapped up over 0.02 million orders at 0.02 million each, causing a loss of 4 million and leading to bankruptcy.

Recently, there was a Little Swan store in Dongshan, which accidentally set the price at 50% of cost. In just over 20 minutes, the bargain hunters placed over 0.04 million orders, with a total value exceeding 70 million. They had to post videos asking netizens to cancel orders.

There have been too many of these things happening.

If an ordinary person happens to benefit from such a loophole, they will definitely feel sorry and then request a refund.

But many loophole enthusiasts are actually after the situation where the merchant does not deliver the goods, and they can claim compensation after complaining, and if the application is too slow and the deposit is deducted completely, leaving them frustrated.

In this kind of 'game', merchants are not completely innocent either, in fact, many loophole enthusiasts and merchants are willing to play along with each other most of the time.

Because the regular cost of acquiring new customers may be much higher than the cost of giving benefits to loophole enthusiasts.

So merchants spend money on promotions, give some discount coupons to loophole enthusiasts, or lower the price a bit. When loophole enthusiasts share the benefits in groups, they can attract a large number of enthusiasts.

In this way, merchants gain traffic, loophole enthusiasts gain benefits, and it's a win-win situation.

Who is the only one who gets hurt? It's the consumers who didn't get the discounts, were deceived by merchants with fake orders, and ended up buying commodities at regular prices.

As e-commerce has developed to this point, traditional discounts are no longer enough to attract more consumers. Therefore, e-commerce platforms can only improve their mechanisms and provide more benefits to consumers.

However, these platform policies actually shrink the space for understanding and communication between merchants and consumers.

After the promotion of 'mandatory freight insurance,' some bargain hunters have rented warehouses and only focus on exploiting the benefits of the freight insurance.

Since last year, pdd holdings has started the trend of 'refund only,' followed quickly by Taobao and jd.com. Soon the bargain hunters found this 'business opportunity.'

The meaning of 'refund only' is that after receiving the goods, one can get a refund without returning them, in other words, 'free ride.'

Compared to the hassle of finding system vulnerabilities or waiting for flash sales, ordering, receiving the goods, and applying for a refund only, this kind of benefit is undoubtedly more convenient for bargain hunters.

However, at the same time, the line between regular consumers and 'bargain hunters' is becoming increasingly blurred, making it harder to distinguish between them, and the space for understanding between merchants and consumers is also getting smaller.

02

Disappearing Space

The decision-making level of the e-commerce platform probably does not quite understand why initially PDD's refund-only policy was widely praised, but after promotion, it drew widespread complaints.

Following the refund-only policy, businesses then took buyers of 11 yuan clothes online to court for refund-only purchases. After court mediation, the buyers paid 800 yuan in legal costs.

In addition, after being refunded only seven to eight hundred times a year, a merchant took a 9-hour train ride, crossed 1,300 kilometers, traveled from Yiwu to Weihai, to demand an explanation from a buyer who returned a 9.9 yuan short-sleeved item.

Image Source: Variety

Some lawyers provided legal consultations on 'refund-only' more than 900 times within a month, with the majority of those seeking advice being merchants rather than consumers.

After optimizing the refund rules, Taobao now intercepts an average of 0.4 million refund-only orders per day.

But this is not just a one-sided dispute for merchants against consumers.

For ordinary consumers, many merchants provide substandard goods with low quality and value, making it difficult and laborious to return or exchange, undoubtedly harming the rights of consumers.

I once encountered a merchant who operated several stores simultaneously, with the same shipping location, selling the same substandard goods at a very low cost but with high sales, betting on how many people would not request a refund and keep the items.

Therefore, whether it is mandatory shipping insurance or refund-only policies, at the beginning of policy implementation, it is actually to benefit consumers and constrain merchants.

However, when these consumer policies are not constrained, they are bound to be exploited, encroaching on the interests of merchants.

"Professional bargain hunters" come up with various methods, even package them into tutorials for sale everywhere, luring consumers with weak ethical concepts to join.

Even a new group has emerged online, where beginners can pay fees ranging from 28.8 yuan to 298 yuan to join, receive training from professionals, and be guided on how to complain to merchants and how to take advantage of differences in delivery times, and even carefully taught on how to deal with customer service in order to profit from loopholes in the system.

Just like in August this year, there was once a “refund only” platform, Jingtaitao, exposed for embezzling 2 billion yuan.

By using a simple Ponzi scheme, many consumers are lured into recharging tens of thousands on the platform. Are these consumers part of the wool party? They are just attracted by 'small bargains'.

As more and more consumers seek 'small bargains', the real organized 'wool party' is getting smaller and smaller.

In the end, ill-gotten gains turned into no legal responsibility, and merchants are left to bear the consequences.

From the consumer's perspective, you may just be a consumer who believes in refunding only what is deserved, but after applying for a refund, the merchant will label you as part of the wool party.

In the eyes of the merchants, among every ten refund applicants, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish how many are genuine consumers and how many are just seeking to take advantage of 'small bargains'.

In the midst of escalating conflicts, what merchants lose is not just money, but also the trust of ordinary consumers, to the point where even legitimate refund requests are met with hostility.

In this "zero-sum game" between consumers and merchants, merchants seem to be born with an "original sin", to the extent that many merchants hope to completely eliminate "refund only."

But not all villains are in business, and not all saints are in consumerism, vice versa.

The people who ruin the good operation foundation of these policies are actually troublemakers in both groups.

First, unscrupulous merchants destroyed consumers' trust in merchants, leading to a sharp increase in return rates, and then mandatory shipping insurance and refund only policies appeared.

Later, because of the scalpers, merchants' trust in consumers was destroyed, resulting in a complete opposition between the two parties, and the opposition to the policies grew louder and louder.

The evil of human nature cannot withstand the test, but perhaps human nature should not be tested by mutual trust.

03

Epilogue

The merchant sells goods, and the consumer buys, it is actually a very simple scenario.

However, in the e-commerce era, consumers cannot see the goods face to face. Merchants need to strive for rankings. Between buying and selling, more profit considerations are inserted, hence, more conflicts arise.

And for the intermediary platform, it also cannot escape responsibility.

Due to the lack of review and correction mechanisms, a one-size-fits-all approach of only refunds abuses consumers' rights, causing harm to merchants.

To improve the relationship between merchants and consumers, platforms need to step forward, establish good mechanisms, while improving consumer rights, eliminate the harm caused to high-quality merchants.

The State Administration for Market Regulation has formally implemented the "Interim Provisions on Internet Anti-Unfair Competition".

Among them, Article 24 states that platform operators shall not unreasonably restrict or attach unreasonable conditions to transactions, transaction prices, and transactions with other operators within the platform using service agreements, transaction rules, and other means.

This might be a correction to the practice of "only refunds".

There are no flawless rules in this world, nor are there absolutely good rule users, but the question is what actions the platform takes.

Is it to ignore and stand by? Or actively take measures and strive to correct?

Recently, the platform's actions may tend towards the latter, but in the long run, building a good trading environment still requires long-term, continuous efforts and adjustments. (End of full text)