Legal Protection Of Consumer’ Rights And Interests In Online Group-buying

As a new consumption patterns, Online Group-buying, rapid "invasion" to traditionalsales and service merchandise areas, with cheapness, convenience, fastness and otheradvantages, and begin to expand to real estate, insurance, financial and other high-endindustries. However, our country’s e-commerce legislation is lagging behind other countries atpresent, and systemic e-commerce legal system has not yet been formed. The Law on theProtection of Consumer Rights and Interests, was too obsolete to adapt to the changing socialdevelopment before been amended in2013. But the amendment also has some imperfections,even though it clearly provides the “the right to withdrawal”,“Personal InformationProtection”,“Consumer Association’s right to file public interest litigation” and so on, forexample，“service” isn’t in the range of goods which can be returned to the trader, and there isno clear standard to define the mean of “good” when people want to return the goods.Thisarticle analyzes the problems in Online Group-buying and give some suggestions to regulateit.The article has four parts in addition to the introduction and conclusion.The first part is “Online Group-buying Overview”. This section introduces thedevelopment of Online Group-buying, then summarizes its three classification models,defines the scope of the study of this article is2.0mode, also introduced Online Group-buyingfeatures, such an cheapness, time limits and the limited number of persons. On this basis,analyzes the performance and nature of the infringement of Online Group-buying, especiallythe infringement on the consumers’ right to know, fair dealing right and the right towithdrawal.The second part is “the problems of Online Group-buying consumer protection”. Thispart is based on the main participants in Online Group-buying transaction, and analyzes theproblems of the protection of government, social intermediate layer and Online Group-buyingsubjects, including: Consumer Protection Law is unsound, the amendment doesn’t regardservice as the object of the right to withdrawal, and the provisions for consumer’s right towithdrawal is inadequate, administrative supervision responsibilities is unclear, inter-sectoralcoordination mechanism is not perfect, Small Interest Civil Suit Procedure has somedeficiencies in dealing with the Online Group-buying, weak industry self-regulatory mechanisms, integrity needs to be strengthened, right to filed a public interest litigationlimited by the rank of Consumers’ Association Consumers, consumer buy irrationally andsome defects of Online Group-buying itself.The third part is “protection measures to improve Online Group-buying”. This part ismainly to propose appropriate measures for the second part. Firstly, clearly define what’s themean of “good”, then regard service as the object of the right to withdrawal, specify the wayfor traders to reimburse payment received from the consumer, endow city and county’sConsumers’ Association the right to file a public interest litigation，establish specialized lawenforcement agencies，use the experience of EU consumer class actions for reference to perfectsmall claims. Then re-establish Consumers’ Association credibility, set up complaintshandling platform. Finally, to protect consumers’ legitimate rights and interests is not only thecommon responsibility of the whole society, but also the consumer’s own responsibility.Therefore, consumers should rationally consume on the network, and enhance awareness ofprotecting rights.