Online Shopping Has No Reason To Refund For Seven Days.

The Standing Committee of the National People's Congress passed the revised law of the People's Republic of China on the protection of consumers' rights and interests. This is the first amendment since the promulgation of the act in 1993, and there are many amendments. The revised law will be implemented on the international consumer protection day March 15, 2014.

In view of the new situations and problems emerging in the consumer domain, the new consumer protection law "clearly keeps pace with the times" has made clear the "no reason to return system" for online shopping, giving consumers online shopping the right to regret, improving the three package regulations and so on, and strengthening the role of the operators.

Liu Junhai, vice president of the China Consumer Association, summed up the concept of the law with "four more": "the most important idea of this amendment to the consumer protection law is to further embody fairness and efficiency, pay more attention to fairness, reflect both norms and development, pay more attention to norms, reflect equal attention to contract freedom and contract justice, pay more attention to contractual justice, and show equal treatment for consumers and operators, while at the same time, they are more inclined to moderately tilt the concept of legislation to consumers."

　　 Conform to the trend

Online shopping spawned "no reason to return system"

Jia Dongming, director of the Civil Affairs Office of the Standing Committee of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, said that the amount of online sales transactions and online retail transactions were 26 billion 300 million yuan in 2006, 1 trillion and 300 billion yuan in 2012, and 48 times in 6 years. Internet sales and online shopping have become an important way of trading.

On the other hand, the data released by the China Consumers Association show that in 2012, consumers' associations at all levels in the country received 20454 complaints about online shopping, accounting for 52.4% of the sales service complaints.

In this regard, the new consumer protection law stipulates that operators sell products in the form of Internet, television, telephone and mail order. Consumers have the right to return the goods within seven days from the date of receipt of the goods, without giving reasons. But consumers customize, live and perishable, online downloading or digital products such as audio and video products and computer software that consumers have sealed up, except newspapers, periodicals, and other commodities that are recognized according to the nature of the commodity and are not returned by consumers when purchasing. The law is clear at the same time, the freight refund freight is borne by the consumer.

"The Internet is bigger and bigger than France," Liu Junhai said. There are malicious competition and other chaos in online shopping activities. With "regret right", allowing consumers to really buy the goods or services they need will help urge businessmen to "talk about one thing" in their activities, consciously eliminate false advertisements and false propaganda, and urge businessmen to concentrate their efforts on improving the quality of their products or services to become truly consumers' favorite businesses.

　　 Punish severely

It costs millions of dollars to cause consumers to die.

The new consumer protection law has also increased the penalties for illegal business operations. The fifty-fifth section of the law stipulates the punishment of the operator's behavior of "knowing the fake selling and selling". First, the punishment for the operator to provide goods or services fraudulent is raised from the "one back and one loss" to the newly revised "retreat one compensate three"; the two is to know that the goods or services are defective, causing the death of the consumers or other victims or serious damage to the health, and stipulates that in addition to investigating the criminal responsibility, it is clear that "the victim has the right to request the operator to compensate the loss according to the forty-ninth and fifty-first articles of this law, and has the right to claim punitive damages below two times the loss".

The forty-ninth and fifty-first provisions "loss" involved not only include personal injury loss, property loss, but also compensation for mental damage.

Jia Dongming introduced that in the course of amending the law, the amount of compensation should be considered objectively and appropriately. If the punishment is low, it will not be punished. But there will be problems with excessive implementation, so there must be an upper limit. Judging from the current judicial practice, the compensation for the death of consumers should be determined by 20 times the per capita disposable income of urban residents in the previous year. In 2012, China's average was 24500 yuan, multiplied by 20 was 490 thousand yuan, which was used as the base of calculation. If added two times, punitive damages would be nearly 1 million 500 thousand yuan. In some developed areas such as Shanghai, the punitive damages will amount to about 2400000 Yuan. "From the point of view of the amount, our country's current economic and social development level, the amount of compensation has been relatively high."

　　 Rights and interests overweight

Personal information is included in the scope of protection.

The personal information leakage in the hotel, the birth of the children always have the sales of milk powder telephone harassment, the registered website is constantly pushed to send advertising mail, the new house has not yet entered, recommended to contact decoration on the "first step". With the development of economy and society, the leakage of personal information seriously affects the normal life of consumers and infringes the legitimate rights and interests of consumers.

The new consumer protection law stipulates that operators should follow the lawful, legitimate and necessary principles to collect and use personal information of consumers, and clearly indicate the purpose, mode and scope of collection and use of information, and agree with consumers. The personal information collected by the operator and his staff must be strictly confidential and must not be divulged, sold or illegally provided to others. The operator shall take technical measures and other necessary measures to ensure information security and prevent personal information leakage and loss of consumers.

Liu Junchen, deputy director of the State Administration for Industry and commerce, said that the revised consumer protection law, which protected the protection of personal information as an interest of consumers, is a bright spot in the revision of the consumer rights protection law. He said that the next step of the industry and Commerce Department is to make personal information protection work as a "12315" center for individual complaints and reporting categories.

　　 Ensuring fairness

"Exclusion clause" is invalid.

The new consumer protection law has changed the original twenty-fourth to twenty-sixth, adding one paragraph as the first paragraph: "operators in the use of standard clauses in business activities should draw consumers' attention to the quantity and quality of goods or services, the price or expenses, the time and manner of performance, safety precautions and risk warning, after sales service, civil liability and other important interests related to consumers."

The first and second paragraphs are changed into second and third paragraphs, which are amended as: "the operator shall not make unfair or unreasonable provisions to consumers in terms of formality clauses, notices, statements, shop notices, etc., to exclude or restrict the rights of consumers, relieve or exempt operators from responsibilities, and increase consumer responsibilities.

"The contents of the form, notice, statement, shop notice, etc., which contain the contents listed in the preceding paragraph, shall not be valid."

This shows that the new law has made clear restrictions on the "overlord clause".

　 Safeguarding rights is easier

New clause "inversion of burden of proof"

The biggest perplexity of consumer rights protection is that "in order to recover a chicken, we must kill a cow".

Because of the asymmetry of information and the lack of financial resources and so on, consumers are fighting the lawsuit. The new consumer protection law has given consumers organizations the right to initiate public interest litigation, and the consumer associations can play a role in safeguarding their rights on behalf of many consumers.

Jia Dongming explained that the public interest litigation in the consumer domain is mainly against numerous and unspecific consumers. For example, unfair, unreasonable format clauses and format contracts violate the interests of numerous and unspecific consumers. For example, some false advertisements and false propaganda objects are numerous and not specific, which can be instituted by the consumers' association according to law.

In addition, the new consumer protection law also stipulates the "burden of proof inversion" which is conducive to consumer provisions.

Yang Lixin, a professor at Renmin University of China, explained that in the civil procedure law, the plaintiff should prove his own opinion when proposing his own opinion in civil litigation disputes. In the field of consumer rights protection, it is sometimes hard for consumers to prove their claims, such as refrigerators and cameras, because of lack of information about technology and so on, it is difficult for consumers to prove whether there is any defect in the product. Therefore, the new law of consumer protection stipulates that the burden of proof should be reversed, and that the operator should prove that his product is free from defects, so that if the operator fails to prove that the product is free from defects, he must bear the blame. So this clause is very beneficial to the protection of consumers.