Legal Analysis On Consumer Protection During Online Shopping

With the rapid development of E-Commerce, quite many consumers prefer online shopping, for it is quick, convenient and free from limit of time and place. It seems that someday online shopping would be more popular than traditional shopping. While at the same time, consumer protection became the bottleneck problem, which constrains the continuous development of online shopping. E-Commerce has the features of electronization, digitization, virtualization, automation, openness and so on, due to which, online shopping is born to be more uncertain and risky than traditional shopping. Selling seconds at best quality prices, selling fake and inferior commodities, false discounts, hiring others to give false evaluation, refusing bad evaluation, revealing personal information of consumers are all focus problems of online shopping disputes. These problems also lead to threats to legal interests of consumers, including the right of safety, the right of fair trade, the right to be informed, right of claims, and right of privacy. Online shopping is quite different with traditional shopping in many aspects, so the current law cannot systematically regulate online shopping. This essay will, according to the current developing situation of online shopping, research other countries on their advanced laws and regulations, raise suggestions for the further improvement of relevant laws and regulations on the protection of consumers’ rights and interests. I hope this essay will help to build a healthy and standardized online shopping environment, to timely and effectively protect online shopping consumers’ legal rights and interests, and to offer a reliable online shopping environment.This essay includes four parts:Part one is the overview of online shopping and online shopping consumer. It introduces the basic conception of online shopping and online shopping consumer, the features of online shopping. And it also distinguishes online shopping from traditional shopping.Part two is the analysis on problems existing in online shopping protection, and reasons that lead to the problems. It introduced phenomenon that online shopping consumers’ legal rights and interests are aggrieved. It find and raised problems that urgently need to be solved and reasons that directly lead to the problems. In detail, the current situation of online shopping in our country is not optimistic, with the consumers’rights and interests suffering many challenges. The right of safety is faced with a lot of threats. Online advertisements that spreads false information of commodities and services are everywhere, injuring consumer’s right of being informed. Commercial emails and short messages flood, influencing consumer’s right to select on their own. Sellers do business dishonestly, harming consumers’ right of fair trade. Personal information are revealed, consumer’s right of privacy being not properly protected. It is hard for consumers to seek for remedies after their rights are injured, right of recovery of damages are discounted. The reason of all the above problem are that the market access and entry standard of online shopping is too low, many sellers doing business dishonestly, that the third party trading platform do poor in supervising, that there lacks sufficient supervision on internet, and that it is short in a sound and effective legal remedy system.Part three is laws and regulations relating consumer protection of other countries. In this part, three typical countries and regions are selected, namely America, the European Union and Korea. Instead of introducing the whole legal system on consumer protection of a certain country, this essay choose to introduce some specific provisions that are advanced, distinguished, outstanding and worthy to learn. America did a good job in regulate and supervise online advertisement. The European Union carried out the jurisdiction of the consumers’domicile. Korea bring insurance system into online shopping. These advanced provisions are of high reference value to China.Part four is solutions and suggestions on legal system of improving online shopping consumer protection. According to the introduction and analysis in the first three parts, considering the current situation of online shopping in China, improve the legal system of online shopping consumer protection. The improvements include formulating a consumer beneficial responsibility undertakes of online payment, regulating the authenticity of online advertisement, crack down the act of sending commercial emails and short messages without the consent of consumers, unified regulating model contract, improving the legal protection on right of privacy, and increasing the cost of breaking the contract during online shopping. Countering the analysis on reasons in the second section of the second part, this essay raised several suggestions on strengthen the market supervision of online shopping. Improve the market access and entry requirement, making a good online shopping environment. Establish a credit system for sellers, pushing them forward to do business honestly. Strengthen the supervising responsibility of the third party trading platform. Improve the capability and efficiency of the supervising agencies and supervisors. At last, this essay also creatively raised suggestions on building a consumer beneficial dispute resolving system, that is, carrying out legal jurisdiction on domicile of consumers and set an online dispute resolving greenway.This essay takes the line of introducing the background, raising problems, analyzing problems and solves problems. It simply analyzes the online shopping consumer protection in China, and creatively gives corresponding resolutions and suggestions, expecting that it may do some good to de consumer. protection in online shopping and that it may help to promote the healthy and continuous development of online shopping.