Research On Legal Issues Of Cross-bordel Online Consumer Contracts

The development of the Internet has provided a great convenience to human life. In business field, the emerging "online shopping" has become an increasingly popular consumption pattern. The main topic "online consumption" in this paper means transactions on the Internet, in order to meet the needs of consumers to purchase goods or services.Online Consumption gives us convenience, but because of the features of the internet it relies on, the disputes occurs differently compared to traditional consumption disputes, especially when it comes to cross-border online consumption, private international law issues presents more complex situations.Since there are no international accepted rules, the online consumer contract disputes arise inevitably due to the conflict of laws, and to solve the disputes, it first comes to the question of Jurisdiction and application of law. Moreover, in the network environment, consumers are cast into a more vulnerable status, whose legal rights often suffer infringement from unscrupulous businessmen. Therefore, to consider the protection of the consumers’interests in resolving the above-mentioned problems gradually become a focus of each country’s theorists and practitioners.As to the issue of jurisdiction, the characteristic of the internet brings unprecedented impact and challenges, breaking the traditional rules of jurisdiction based on boundaries of the sovereign territory. Legislative differences exist in the national and international conventions on the jurisdiction of online consumer contracts, this paper attempts to explore the jurisdiction pattern about cross-border consumer contract, through case analysis and the study of the relatively complete theory and practice of jurisdiction of online consumer contract in European countries and the United State.As to the application of law in online consumption, the impact of the Internet mainly falls in two aspects, the difficulty in deciding the connecting factor and the absence of applicable law. The traditional objective connection factor is difficult to be effectively applied in the online consumer transactions. It is necessary to re-examine the application of law problem in online consumer disputes. This paper analyzes and summarizes other countries of organizations’legislation and practice in terms of the online consumer disputes, to elaborate the rules of application of law, mainly focuses on the application rules of contract disputes and tort disputes in online consumption.In the field the cross-border jurisdiction and application of law of online consumer contract, China is still in a state legislative gap. So we may follow the international trends and learn from foreign competed practices, to establish the rules of jurisdiction and application of law in cross-border online consumption as soon as possible, in purpose of protecting of the legitimate rights of online consumers, and promoting the e development of the online commerce.