Only 30 days after the refund was fully implemented, the merchant was miserable

At the end of last month, Taobao and JD.com announced that they would start supporting refund-only. Coupled with Pinduoduo and Douyin e-commerce, which have previously implemented refund-only, "refund-only" has been fully implemented on mainstream e-commerce platforms.

So, what does the refund-only landing bring to merchants, and what is their attitude towards it?

Commodities with low unit price have become the hardest hit areas

We know that Pinduoduo is the first platform to implement the refund-only function, so the follow-up major platforms have also begun to follow Pinduoduo's refund-only rules, giving priority to covering products with low customer unit prices.

A merchant who sells mobile phone cases said that there is basically no "genuine" distinction between functional small commodities like mobile phone cases, and the workmanship is almost the same, and there are few quality problems. However, since the launch of the refund-only function, there have been significantly more users who have come to "pick up wool", which has made the already low-profit store even worse.

Another merchant in the Pinduoduo snack industry said that the platform's refund-only was almost "unreasonable", and before communicating with the user, the platform sent the user a refund-only link, and there was no need to provide evidence at all. There are even users who apply for a refund only for orders placed three months ago, and the box of snacks sent over may have already been eaten.

Source: Little Red Book

According to the situation reflected by the merchants, "refund only" mainly covers merchants with a unit price of less than 20 yuan, especially some white-label small commodities with 9.9 free shipping.

The reason why this type of merchant has become a "test field" for refunds only in the first place is because of the cost of returns. Due to the low unit price, the return shipping cost of some goods is higher than the product itself, and "refund and return" has become a pseudo option for consumers, and many consumers have to "admit it" with resentment. In order to improve the experience of consumers buying small goods, the platform prioritizes giving them refunds only, so as to increase user stickiness.

Moreover, long before the full implementation of refund-only, many small commodity sellers took the initiative to support refund-only, but also "abandoned" the goods for the reason of shipping costs, after all, the returned defective products could not be sold again.

However, the "green channel" opened by the platform for ordinary consumers has provided convenience for some people to "gather wool". They determined that those merchants who were moving in volume did not have time to care about the gains and losses of this part, and with the support of the platform behind them, they were able to "prostitute for nothing" unscrupulously.

The most wronged are some virtual goods sellers, whose product unit price is not low, but because it is difficult for virtual goods to provide valid delivery certificates, they are judged by the platform to be false delivery and suffer losses.

Source: Screenshot of the merchant's mobile phone information

The olive branch of the platform to consumers has become an unbearable burden for merchants at this time.

The cost of time is also a cost

It's not just the financial loss of refunds that is a headache for merchants, but also the time costs that come with it.

As we all know, after-sales is an important part of e-commerce operation, and customer service is an indispensable role. Small-scale stores can still be concurrently served by the owner, and a slightly larger store should hire a dedicated customer service to answer user questions and deal with after-sales problems.

The landing of only refunds has increased the burden of after-sales. When the platform approves the consumer's refund-only application, the merchant not only accepts the result, but also has the right to appeal to the platform. Since the platform does admit that there is a misjudgment, merchants often choose to appeal, and they can recover one order after another.

However, the grievance process consumes a lot of time and effort from the after-sales party. An e-commerce customer service complained, "I didn't do anything in one day, and I processed 10 refunds only." "Time cost is also a cost, when customer service spends time only on refunds, the quality of service in other aspects will inevitably decline, thus affecting daily operations.

On the other hand, refund-only has also fueled the arrogance of some users to "maliciously bad reviews". There have always been some buyers on major e-commerce platforms who are good at threatening merchants with bad reviews. Even if there is no problem with the product itself, they will find faults, deliberately find faults, and ask the merchant for cash compensation.

The landing of only refunds sends a signal that "the platform is biased towards buyers", which provides confidence for these buyers. They knew that the platform would not necessarily support the normal process, so they "communicated" with the seller first, threatened the seller with a bad review and only refunded, and if the seller refused to reduce the amount, bargained. Many businesses have no choice but to lose money in order to keep people from bad reviews.

A record seller said that after a buyer bought records worth about 2,000 yuan in more than a dozen orders in her store, a user who claimed to be the buyer's mother applied for a refund only on the grounds that "goods should not be sold to minors", which was supported by the platform. After she rejected the refund application, she was rejected by the platform and felt very aggrieved, after all, she could not verify the real age of the user.

So, in the face of these unscrupulous buyers, is there nothing the seller can do? In fact, it is not at all, the seller can take legal means to solve it. At present, there are relevant precedents showing that it is a breach of contract to refund without returning a refund but cannot provide a substantive basis, and the court will generally support the merchant's claim.

It's just that the time cost will still fall on the business.

It's not against refunds only, it's against one size fits all

Actually, not all sellers hate refund-only refunds. Some brand sellers said that because they sell high-quality authentic products, they rarely encounter buyers' requests for only refunds, and the platform has always been on their side. On the contrary, they are copycat sellers who pretend to be themselves, and the number of them has become less and less due to the increase in costs due to only refunds.

Indeed, one of the main functions of the refund line alone is to combat the rampant fakes. Because the cost of counterfeit goods is inherently low, a simple refund and return is not enough to deter sellers. However, the hidden cost of counterfeit goods to buyers is very high, to take an extreme example, when a candidate uses a fake 2B pencil to take the test, but because the quality problem is not recognized by the machine and the list is lost, the loss cannot be measured in money at all.

However, some merchants said that they were "mistakenly injured" by the platform, and some of them are obviously the responsibility of the buyer, such as taking the wrong goods, not using the goods correctly, deliberately creating defects, etc., but they are all blamed on the seller. At the same time, whether only the refund can be established also depends on the handling of the platform's Xiao Er, once Xiao Er has a misjudgment, no matter how much argument it will do.

Therefore, merchants are not against refunds only, but against "one size fits all". Refunds alone may not be a matter of rules, but of enforcement. If the execution is not good, it is only convenient for the platform, not for the merchants.

Currently, platforms that support refund-only tend to have some filtering methods. For example, based on big data, Taobao will form a multi-faceted comprehensive evaluation of the goods sold by the seller through a single or multi-dimensional combination of the seller's store quality indicators (such as quality scores), a large number of customer complaints on the buyer's side, and the perception of counterfeit and shoddy problems, and then determine that the goods sold recently have reached a high degree of probability that there are improper descriptions, confusion, misleading, counterfeit and shoddy situations.

However, according to the seller, there are times when the big data of each platform is inaccurate, and even manual handling of appeals may not be able to make correct judgments.

In short, when refund-only becomes the "standard" in the e-commerce industry, the corresponding mechanisms and facilities also need to be improved. Don't let the good deeds of Pratt & Whitney become a tool for the wicked.

Author | The wind is clear