In today's society, the trend of "roll-up service" has become popular between platforms and merchants. However, any one-sided sacrifice of merchant benefits to excessively cater to consumer experience or practice that harms consumer rights in favor of unilaterally protecting merchant profits is like a flash in the pan and difficult to sustain in the long run.

Overall, Taotian's new strategy aims to improve the quality of the platform's services, enhance user experience and protect consumer rights, and promote healthy development of merchants.$Alibaba (BABA.US)$Please use your Futubull account to access the feature.

Behind this also reflects how to find a delicate balance point between merchants and consumers, build a fair and reasonable business environment, has become an increasingly urgent issue.

The new version experience score is officially launched.

Recently, Taobao has fully launched the new version experience score system. Under the new system, the experience score will not only be linked to store and product traffic, but also become the key to protect merchant rights in after-sales scenarios.

It is understood that the new version of the experience score system includes "store experience score" and "product experience score (PXI)", which will completely replace the previous DSR system. Prior to this, the new experience score system had been in internal testing for several months.

The new version experience score system will not only be applied comprehensively in the operating scenarios of stores such as the hand-taobao search, the home page you may like, the Ali mother related advertising delivery and the activity registration, but also provide more independent disposal rights for merchants in after-sale scenarios such as refunds, appeals and abnormal shipments based on the experience score. During the after-sale process, the platform will reduce or cancel its intervention based on the experience score, and allow merchants to negotiate with consumers independently.

It is worth noting that after the official landing of the new version experience score system, it will also become the key basis for optimizing the existing after-sales processes of Taobao Tmall.

Specifically, in multiple after-sale scenarios such as refunds, appeals, and abnormal shipments, Taobao Tmall will clearly assign different independent disposal rights to merchants based on the experience score, and reduce or cancel direct intervention by the platform for normal business operations of merchants while fully ensuring consumer rights.

Currently, this rights protection rule has begun internal testing at excellent experience score shops in some parts.

Optimizing the "refund only" policy

In order to increase merchant's after-sale autonomy based on the store experience score, Taobao also announced the optimization of the "refund only" policy, to increase merchant's after-sale autonomy based on the new version of the experience score, and reduce or cancel after-sale interventions for high-quality stores. The relevant policies will be implemented on August 9th.

After the policy is launched, for merchants whose comprehensive experience score is ≥4.8 points, Taobao will not intervene through Ali Wangwang, but instead encourage merchants to negotiate with consumers. For merchants in other score ranges, the platform will assign different levels of independent disposal rights based on the experience score and nature of the industry. The higher the experience score, the greater the merchant's disposal rights.

In addition to giving merchants more autonomy, Taobao will also provide multiple after-sales service solutions for merchants to choose from, guiding merchants to continuously optimize after-sales services and reduce disputes and losses caused by "refund only".

In fact, since this year, major e-commerce platforms have successively introduced the "refund only" measures, which effectively protect consumer rights. However, it cannot be ignored that while "refund only" protects consumers, it has also been abused by some "wool party" and has damaged the rights of some normally operating merchants.

Some industry insiders have expressed that platforms also need to actively explore how to significantly optimize the business environment while protecting consumer rights, and form a more benign and healthy e-commerce ecology.

Tmall will completely cancel annual fees

Focusing on reducing operating costs, from September 1st of this year, Tmall will also officially cancel all annual software service fees (referred to as "annual fees") for the platform.

In previous years, Tmall's merchants in different categories had to pay an annual fee of RMB 0.03-0.06 million. After the exemption of this new policy is implemented, new merchants who enter Tmall after September 1st this year will no longer need to pay this fee. At the same time, for merchants whose operating turnover reaches the annual target from January-August 2024, Tmall will fully refund the annual fee.

In addition, Taotian will officially implement the policy of charging basic software service fees, which will be calculated at 0.6% of the successfully transacted amount per order. This measure actually follows the common practice in the e-commerce industry and aims to reasonably share and cover the costs of advanced system construction and maintenance provided by the platform for merchants.

Looking back at the market, as early as 2020,$PDD Holdings (PDD.US)$it has already introduced a basic technical service fee system of 0.6% to 1% to platform merchants to support the continuous optimization and upgrade of their technical services. Since 2023, e-commerce giants such as JD.com and Douyin have also adjusted their service fee policies, all setting the basic technology service fee rate at 0.6%.

Before the complete cancellation of annual fees, Taobao and Tmall had already launched a series of measures to benefit businesses, including AI business tools, free business consultants, shipping and logistics subsidies, and other measures to reduce operating costs and improve efficiency for all brands and merchants.

Editor/Emily