40% of Inspected Products on Chinese Ecommerce Sites are Fake
China’s ecommerce market is massive and only getting bigger. But it seems that the country’s e-tailers haven’t quite been able to exorcize the demon that plauged Chinese ecommerce in its earlier years: fake products.
A new report from China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOC) shows that in the second half of 2014, nearly 40 percent of the ecommerce products the Ministry inspected were fake or illegal.
Granted, the Ministry’s inspections represent a minute sample size. The MOC inspected 92 products over the the second half of 2014, and found that just 54 of them were authentic. Samples were purchased from a variety of ecommerce platforms, including Alibaba’s Taobao and Tmall, Alibaba rival JD, and a number of other smaller players.
Inspectors found a litany of issues across products in categories from mobile phones to makeup kits, including products that were missing required permits and products that were straight-up fakes.
It’s not clear which sites were the worst offenders, but inspectors did note that – unsurprisingly – most of the fake products on major sites were being offered by third-party sellers. In all likelihood, buyers can protect themselves pretty well by ensuring that they’re ordering either from the site itself or from an official third-party shop operated by the brand of product they’re buying.
