The storm escalates again! Hundreds of sellers "besiege" Temu headquarters to defend their rights

As competition in the cross-border e-commerce industry intensifies, the conflict between platforms and sellers is also deepening.

According to industry insiders, the conflict between Temu and sellers has escalated again! A large number of sellers have gone to Temu's Guangzhou headquarters to defend their rights.

Sellers are angry! Temu fine controversy continues to ferment

On July 29, hundreds of sellers gathered in the office area of ​​Temu headquarters to collectively denounce the platform's harsh penalty policy. They shouted slogans, demanding that the platform return the fines and deposits and defend their legal rights.

(Picture source: Internet video screenshot)

What is different about this rights protection is that these sellers are ready for a protracted war. They said they have prepared toiletries and are ready to live in the office area of ​​Temu’s headquarters. They will leave when Temu releases the funds.

I believe everyone still remembers the rights protection actions of sellers on July 22, when hundreds of sellers gathered downstairs of Temu’s headquarters office building to defend their rights. Judging from the short video revelations at the scene, the sellers who were defending their rights were basically those who were fined by the platform. The amount of fines for sellers ranged from a few hundred thousand to several million or even tens of millions.

Some rights-defending sellers compiled a list of fines at the rights protection site on July 22, involving reserved amounts and fines, with a total amount of 114 million yuan, involving 279 merchants.

Now, the sellers are defending their rights again, but it seems the problem is still not solved.

According to the data provided by the sellers on the scene, the rights protection action on July 29 showed that the amount of post-sale fines and post-sale reserves was about 138 million yuan, involving 407 merchants. Since most of these merchants are relatively small, they are unable to bear the huge fines from Temu.

The story behind the seller's rights protection incident

What triggered these two rights protection actions? It all started with Temu’s refund mechanism.

Since May this year , a large number of Temu sellers have complained on social media platforms that their stores have encountered consumers frequently applying for "goods only refunds", and the platforms have all agreed to the consumers' applications, causing heavy losses to the sellers' stores.

There are even a large number of tutorials on "Temu platform 0 yuan purchase" emerging on the Internet .

For example, on a certain overseas social platform, several bloggers posted tutorials on how to get refunds but not returns when shopping on the Temu platform. The number of views was quite high, and some consumers even posted their own free-riding achievements by imitating the "0 yuan purchase" tutorial in the comment section.

If you search "Temu Refund Without Return" on Google , you can also retrieve a large number of tutorials on Temu refund without return.

There are a large number of "freeloader" communities on the American social platform Reddit. These communities basically share methods of "buying for free on the Temu platform" every day, and community members are scrambling to follow suit to get free stuff.

The emergence of a large number of "Temu platform 0 yuan purchase" consumers has caused many sellers to suffer.

Temu , which is famous for its low prices , will give priority to consumers' shopping experience during the transaction process. If the following situations occur, consumers will be allowed to only refund without returning the goods.

1. The consumer expresses dissatisfaction with the order;

2. The goods are damaged, defective or not the goods ordered by the consumer;

3. The product is missing;

4. The order has been returned free of charge once.

In addition to the above four situations, consumers on the Temu platform can still apply for a refund for products that do not meet the refund criteria through means such as negative review complaints , thus achieving "free shopping".

These "freeloaders" take advantage of loopholes in platform rules and use unfair means to make purchases for free , which is detrimental to the e-commerce ecosystem .

This requires the Temu platform to continue to optimize its refund policy and technical system to reduce the occurrence of such behavior and protect the legitimate rights and interests of sellers.

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Although Temu said it has begun to fix this loophole, such as limiting the number of refunds that can be applied for within a certain period of time, this problem still cannot be eliminated, and many sellers can only choose to swallow their anger. But what makes the situation of sellers even worse is Temu 's 5-fold fine policy.

Temu's penalty regulations are mainly aimed at problems such as sellers ' substandard product quality, delayed delivery, inadequate after-sales service, etc. The after-sales penalty calculation rule is 5 times the seller's declared price .

If the seller declares a product price of 100 yuan, if the product has quality problems, Temu will impose a fine of up to 5 times the product price, that is, 500 yuan . If 5 items are returned due to the same problem within 15 days , an additional fine of 1,000 yuan per item will be added.

However , the platform has always had the final say on the specific details of Temu 's 5-fold penalty policy . Sellers lack understanding of the details and are always in a relatively passive position.

Sellers said that Temu's penalty mechanism is unreasonable and the frequency of penalties is increasing. No one can afford fines of hundreds of thousands, millions or even tens of millions!

Some sellers said that Temu's fines were not detailed, and they could only show which batch of goods was fined, but could not trace it back to the specific goods. Moreover, they said that the fine was 5 times due to poor quality, but there was not even a photo of the quality. Whether there was a quality problem or a duplicate fine was all up to Temu, and sellers had no way to verify it.

On the other hand, there is no regular time period for Temu fines. The fines that pop up in the same month may be for products sold over a period of several months, and many of them are orders sold half a year ago.

What’s even more outrageous is that a seller said that he had removed the product from the shelves a long time ago, but he is still receiving fines.

On July 22, the "rights protection incident" ended in the morning, and Temu announced a new rule called "Product Quality Accident Handling Rules" in the afternoon. This new rule established a new penalty mechanism for sellers, aiming to improve the overall quality of the platform's products.

The new regulations update some clauses and fix some bugs. The key points include the base amount of fines, fine coefficients, and red line classification.

1. Fine base : The fine base is generally divided into several levels such as 1000, 3000, 5000, 10000, etc.

2. Penalty coefficients : The coefficients can be roughly divided into the following categories:

① If the base number is not reached, the penalty will be based on the base number, which means that the cap is limited.

② Fine base × number of inventory orders for the illegal products in the past ninety days, or 2

③Declared price × number of units sold in the past thirty days corresponding to the illegal product × 1 to 3 times

Among them, items ② and ③ are generally implemented based on the higher amount, so the penalty base * penalty coefficient is the actual penalty for the seller . The penalty base will be different for different quality accidents .

3. Red line classification: Sellers should distinguish the penalty red lines according to the calculation of the fine amount, and check by themselves which red line situations are the most serious. All situations involving fines should be checked and avoided by themselves.

However , this new regulation aroused strong dissatisfaction among sellers , which led to the incident on July 29th when sellers surrounded Temu headquarters to defend their rights.

One seller said : "They have no choice but to choose this way of defending their rights, because Temu 's penalty policy is almost pushing many small and medium-sized sellers to a dead end. "

At present, the incident is still fermenting . Pinduoduo finally responded!

On the evening of July 30, Pinduoduo exclusively responded to a domestic media outlet, saying: "The platform will not earn money from fines for merchants violating regulations. If fines are imposed, they will be compensated to consumers."

An insider of Pinduoduo revealed in an interview with the media that there were actually only a dozen "troublemakers" in this so-called "rights protection" incident, and they were mainly concentrated in the clothing category. Many other people at the scene were "invited" by these merchants. These merchants hope to digest inventory problems through cross-border e-commerce. When there are problems such as false shipments, size discrepancies, and forged quality inspection labels, the platform protects the rights and interests of consumers by deducting consumer security deposits . After being punished by Pinduoduo, a few merchants hope to attract attention and make profits by "distributing according to the number of disturbances" , which is unfair to legally operating merchants. However, the person repeatedly emphasized that the above statement was a verbal explanation he gave to the reporter and was not an official response from the company.

What do you think of Pinduoduo’s response to this “rights protection” incident ?

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Sellers’ rights protection