Solving Cross-Border Online-Shopping Disputes By Online Dispute Resolution (ODR)

As a virtual market, Internet has offered a borderless mall for the consumers from all over the world, according to OECD's statistics, there are 38% of consumers shopped online in 2009 in the world. What aforementioned has give some new challenges to the consumer protection, and the resolution of online-shopping disputes is one of these challenges which is crucial to the consumers interests. Besides, the nature of internet's borderlessness and globality makes lots of online-shopping disputes cross-borderly. This paper pay a special attention to the resolution of cross-border online shopping, and propose a proper solution to it by study the traditional off-line disputes resolution and emerging online disputes resolution.This paper contains three parts, the first chapter mainly discuss the e-commerce, cross-border online shopping and its disputes, traditional disputes resolution, and give a background research for the discussion about a better resolution for cross-border online shopping disputes. It's essential to understand the specialty of the cross-border online-shopping and its disputes which compare to the traditional face-to-face shopping and its disputes, so we can design a new kind of resolution to adapt to the internet environment. In this chapter, the paper details the major features of online-shopping, such as virtuality, information-based, low-cost, borderless and so on, and the major features of online-shopping disputes, such as the disputes have large quantity and wide range, the dispute subjects have low value, and the disputes involve some international elements. In the end of this chapter, the reasons of why the traditional off-line disputes resolution is not suit online-shopping disputes are explained, these reasons contains the cost of money and time is high and there are complicate jurisdiction and law-application issues.Then the second chapter discusses why and how to use online disputes resolution (ODR) to solve cross-border online-shopping disputes. In the first part of this chapter, the paper introduces the definition, history and development of ODR, and discusses the pros and cons of ODR in solving the cross-border online-shopping disputes. After that, the paper discusses online mediation, online arbitration and auction websites'internal disputes resolutions, which are three typical modality of ODR, and demonstrates the problems and challenges of the development of ODR. In the discussion of these three modality, the paper review the practices of Smartsettle, SquareTrade, Virtual Magistrate Project, EBAY disputes resolution center, and PayPal mediation center in the solving of cross-border online-shopping disputes to give a direct understanding on solving such disputes by ODR.In the first part of Chapter three, the paper discusses the international conflict and coordination in cross-border online-shopping disputes resolution to gain an overall understanding on the current situation of solving of cross-border online-shopping disputes by ODR. After that, the paper turns back to China, and discusses the status quo of China's resolution of cross-border online-shopping disputes in the sight of theory and practice. In the end, the paper give some advises to improve ODR's effects in solving cross-border online-shopping disputes, these advises are relate to auction websites, ODR provider, the cost of ODR, the implement of decision, international cooperation and so on.It's beyond all doubts that online-shopping has entered our life, and its meaning to today's consumer is not only an emerging convenient shopping tool, but also the future way of human's consume. What we should do to welcome this unstoppable trend of history is more than preparing a curiosity for new things and proficient computer skills, and also need to improve all the systems related to online-shopping including disputes resolution, that will be make the global e-market developing and prosperity.