Internet shopping malls have become a bastion of counterfeit designer goods, offering shoppers the ability to buy with a simple click everything from designer bags and clothes worth millions of won to famous-brand sporting goods, for prices 10 to 20 percent of the genuine article (US$1=W1,042). The counterfeit goods scene moved from offline to online a while ago, and the recent trend is that with increasing crackdowns on fake products in cyberspace, those items are secretly traded on portals’ cyber-cafes or blogs instead of shopping malls.
Another difference is now it’s consumers who are falling victim. Many people are complaining that they have purchased fake goods on local or foreign Internet shopping malls but never received them, let alone being able to exchange them or get a refund. Kwon Soo-yeon, a college student, bought a famous brand watch from an overseas shopping site for W120,000. But when she received the watch, she found that it was nothing more than a crude fake. Contacting the site for a refund proved fruitless. “I learned a lesson that the cheap ones are fake,” she said. “I’m too embarrassed to complain about it.”
Graphic designer Baek Joo-hee had a similar experience. She spent W210,000 on an online shopping mall for a bag she never received. She tried to contact the retailer two weeks after she ordered, but she couldn’t get hold of it. What’s worse, she found to her sorrow that the site was closed.
The Fair Trade Commission took punitive measures against Gmarket, Korea’s leading open marketplace, for selling counterfeits. But when it removed the offending products from its site, it posted untrue claims that the items were “sold out” or “unavailable due to defects.” The problem is this has prevented many people who made purchases on the site from getting refunds. Gmarket reportedly violated the trademarks of some 29,000 kinds of items worth W24.57 billion from May 2005 until August 2007.
According to Seoul Customs, the size of the Korean e-commerce market exceeded W500 trillion last year, with computer-to-computer transactions, which mostly deal in counterfeit goods, more than doubling from W230 billion in 2005 to W500 billion in 2007.
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June 23, 2009 at 12:51 pm
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