The General Department for Market Surveillance has recently set up a working team on e-commerce to deal with the increasing number of trade violations online.

Hanoi market-watch team checks masks sold in a medicine wholesale market
on Nguyen Huy Tuong Street. (Photo: cafef)

The department, under the Ministry of Industry and Trade, said the amount of banned goods, counterfeit goods, goods that infringe intellectual property rights, goods of unknown origin and poor-quality goods on e-commerce websites “was alarming”.

It said that the illegal trading had affected the whole society and badly hurt consumer confidence.

In 2019, market-watch teams found 2,213 violations when they checked 2,400 cases. They handed out fines worth more than 57 billion VND (2.45 million USD) for those cases and to websites which operated and processed the trading of violating goods.

To better handle the violations, the department’s director issued Decision No. 368/QĐ-TCQLTT on the establishment of the Working Team on E-commerce (Team 368) with the task of advising and assisting the director in e-commerce management.

According to the decision, Team 368 will inspect, control and urge compliance with legal provisions on trade nationwide. It is also responsible for coordinating the inspection and handling of cases or transferring documents to agencies and functional forces to handle cases and violations related to activities of market management in e-commerce.

Under cooperation with the Department of Electronic Commerce and Digital Economy to supervise the online stalls which sell face masks and hand sanitiser products that help protect people from the Covid-19 epidemic, the department checked 75,000 stalls on the e-commerce websites of Sendo.vn, Shopee.vn, Lazada.vn, Tiki.vn, chotot.com, vatgia.com, fado.vn.

By March 2, they found and removed 8,900 sellers offering 23,000 violating products.

According to data released by German market research firm Statista, in 2019, Vietnam’s e-commerce revenue reached more than 2.96 billion USD. The firm also estimated that the e-commerce this year could reach 3.385 billion USD. Vietnam was on the list of the six most developed e-commerce countries.

Local data also showed that 85 percent of the Vietnamese population use the internet, ranking 13th among the 20 countries with the highest proportion of internet users in the world last year.