Douyin fights loss of customer trust with crackdown vendors

China’s version of TikTok, Douyin, has promised a fresh attack on vendors that break its e-commerce rules amid fears the platform will lose customers because of a loss of trust.

Not yet a year old, Douyin E-commerce claims its business has already grown more than 12 times in terms of gross merchandise value, reports Caixin. But the ByteDance-owned platform, which is challenging the country’s e-commerce giants, Pinduoduo, JD.com and Alibaba, has been heavily criticized for the behaviour of some of the merchants selling through its platform.

The details

• Kang Zeyu, Douyin’s E-commerce head, told an e-commerce summit in Guangzhou the platform would crack down on a number of recurring problems, such as sellers faking sales figures, not making customer ratings clear, and selling fake goods.
• By the end of 2020, Douyin had discovered and “taken care of” 438,800 videos and 14,400 livestreaming sessions that broke its policies and rules, the company said. And 9,384 sellers had been removed for selling counterfeit goods.
• Kang also said that Douyin had deployed its own algorithms to gather data on customers in order to present targeted ads, describing the effects as “just like street shopping when people do not always know what they desire at first”.

Key quote

“We wouldn’t mind seeing the gross merchandise value of items sold on the platform decrease, but we have to step up regulation on retailers and their services through our platform.” Kang Zeyu, head of Douyin’s e-commerce unit. 

Sourced from Caixin