Chinese e-commerce platforms to be held responsible for safety of food products, Supreme Court says
- From next year, e-commerce platforms have to make food vendors register with their real names and check their licences
- If they fail to do so and customers complain about food safety issues, they can be held jointly liable with the vendors
E-commerce platforms in China can be held legally responsible for food safety issues related to products purchased on their platforms, China’s top court said on Wednesday, as online food purchases continue to rise in popularity due to the coronavirus pandemic.
From the beginning of next year, e-commerce platform operators will be required to conduct real-name registration for vendors selling food products and to review the latter’s business licences, the Supreme People’s Court of The People’s Republic of China said in a document released on Wednesday.
If platform operators fail to comply with the obligations, consumers whose interests have been affected as a result have the right to ask the platform operators to bear joint legal responsibility with the relevant food producers, according to the document.
“Since the outbreak of the pandemic this year, food deliveries and other online activities have been unprecedentedly active,” said Zheng Xuelin, chief judge of the Supreme Court’s first civil division at a press conference on Wednesday. “However, online food purchases have certain risks: if the qualifications and reputations of online food operators cannot be guaranteed, it will easily lead to food safety issues.”
China, the world’s largest online retail market, had over 749 million online shoppers as of June this year, according to a report by the state-run China Internet Network Information Centre in September. A separate report by research firm iiMedia in November showed that 62.26 per cent of the country’s e-commerce users shopped online for packaged food products this year.
