In 2024, after the e-commerce Industry took the lead in relaxing the "refund only" policy and launched "Return Treasure", Taobao once again introduced dozens of measures to optimize the business environment to protect merchants' rights.

On January 9, Taobao Tianmao announced at the merchant services conference that it would establish the first account integrity system in the e-commerce Industry, working with merchants to build a healthy e-commerce ecosystem. It is reported that for abnormal refund-only requests, return substitutions, false returns, and online image editing behaviors, merchants can report these issues to be recorded in the account integrity system, and the platform will review them and may reject after-sales requests, impose purchase limits at a single store or on the platform; for professional "wool gatherers", Taobao Tianmao will cooperate with relevant departments to transfer cases to judicial authorities.

Around the new account integrity system, Taobao Tianmao will launch a series of measures:

1. Optimize the merchant complaint process, upgrade the Business Treasure complaint protection and refund and appeal feedback mechanism. It is reported that the newly upgraded Business Treasure has simplified complaint types, increased complaint accuracy, and reduced review times.

2. Upgrade the comprehensive abnormal refund protection, enabling one-click feedback for false documents and abnormal refunds, and providing one-click warnings for return risks.

3. Fully enhance the capacity to handle abnormal behaviors. The handling of abnormal behaviors includes but is not limited to the platform not intervening actively, restricting orders on accounts or stores, removing product return/dispute rates, etc. Taobao Tianmao will initially pilot these measures for high-service merchants with scores above 4.8 and gradually open them to all merchants. After opening to all merchants, Taobao Tianmao will grant corresponding rights based on experience scores.

While establishing the new account integrity system, Taobao Tianmao will also perform comprehensive optimization of platform rules and provide various service tools to safeguard merchants' operations.

1. In response to the cost issues of returns and exchanges, Taobao Tianmao will further optimize the "Return Treasure" mechanism.

In 2025, Taobao Tmall will pilot a model for some users to provide more diverse options for merchants using "Return Treasure", safeguarding the merchants' right to operate independently. For Taobao merchants, "Return Treasure" will be decoupled from Taobao's major promotions, allowing merchants to freely choose whether to use the "Return Treasure" product during platform promotions, helping small and medium-sized merchants further reduce operational costs. Data shows that since the launch of "Return Treasure", it has systematically reduced merchants' return and exchange costs by 10%-30%.

To address the recurring incidents of incorrect pricing by merchants in recent years, Taobao Tmall will introduce a new price-setting protection mechanism to provide strong rule support for safeguarding the property rights of platform merchants.

Under the new rules, the platform will balance the interests of all parties and provide various handling methods for merchants based on individual cases, including but not limited to supporting order cancellations for pricing or discount mis-designation and offering small compensations to consumers.

In response to prominent issues in dispute resolution, Taobao Tmall will further clarify industry standards this year, making the dispute resolution guidelines clearer.

The new rules specify scenarios that do not fall under quality issues, such as the apparel industry not following explicit washing instructions; they also clarify the timeliness of consumer feedback on issues, such as the jewelry category not needing to provide feedback within 48 hours of receiving. Currently, Taobao Tmall has issued detailed guidelines for the apparel, jewelry and pet industries, while dispute handling norms for more segmented industries like 3C digital, fast-moving consumer goods, and secondary luxury are in progress.

Regarding the experience score system, Taobao Tmall will not only provide more traffic support for high-quality service merchants, helping the industry break free from low-price competition, but will also improve the experience score indicators to make them more segmented and clearer, further making the experience score more transparent.

5, Upgrade of the store assistant AI product.

In 2025, the store assistant will offer personalized AI intelligent services such as pre-sale AI guidance and post-sale self-service, while also assisting human customer service to continuously reduce costs and improve efficiency for merchants. Data shows that previously launched customer service robot store assistants from Taobao Tmall now have 6 million active merchants annually.

6. Taobao and Tmall will launch or upgrade various service tools to help merchants reduce their operational burdens and improve service capabilities.

In the refund scenario, Taobao and Tmall will introduce refund analysis to help merchants discover potential business opportunities; the order recovery tool will be further upgraded. Through the newly upgraded platform intelligent order recovery and merchant intelligent order recovery, Taobao and Tmall will assist merchants in achieving full-link intelligent order recovery. Regarding merchant customer service tools, Taobao and Tmall will provide AI customer service plugins, offering service intention recognition, AI summary, knowledge assistance, and customer service intelligent quality inspection services.

Since July last year, after the initial relaxation of the "refund only" policy, Taobao and Tmall have launched various business environment optimization measures such as experience scores and "Return Treasure", continuously improving the platform's business environment and consumer experience.

As of now, the total number of "refund only" transactions on the Taobao and Tmall platform has decreased by 30%, while proactive interception of abnormal refunds has increased threefold, and the volume of shipping complaint compensation has dropped by over 50%, effectively protecting merchant operations; the consumer experience is also continuously improving, with the proportion of merchants scoring above 4.8 in experience scores increasing from 30% to 36%, and the proportion of high-scoring products with experience scores above 90% now reaching 60%.

In 2025, with more business environment optimization strategies being launched, Taobao and Tmall will further work with merchants to address persistent issues in the e-commerce industry, bringing a positive, stable business environment and certainty in growth, leading the e-commerce industry back to value competition.