Onus on online platforms to regulate their clients or face consumer backlash

A pedestrian uses his mobile phone in front of a logo of online travel search service Qunar in Jinan city, East China's Shandong province, February 15, 2015. [Photo/IC]

FOUR MAJOR domestic airline companies recently announced they were canceling their cooperation with qunar.com, a domestic airline ticket booking website, because of customer complaints. That should be a lesson to all online platforms, says a comment on Guangming Daily:

For a long time there have been complaints about qunar.com and similar companies, which range from being overcharged for tickets, bundling tickets with insurance without pre-notice, as well as canceling flights without telling passengers. The website failed to deal with these complaints properly, which finally led to the airlines deciding to end their cooperation with it.

That reflects the difficulties facing domestic websites. Like all of them, qunar.com provides a platform for ticket agents to serve passengers, and it is this mode that helped the website win a third of the domestic market for flight bookings. However, this mode requires the website to well regulate the service providers on it and any neglect or failure to supervise them will ruin its reputation.

Qunar.com is not the only website facing this dilemma. Taobao.com, China's largest online shopping platform, has also met problems as some of the retailers on it sell fake goods. A huge share of the market has been won by jd.com, which runs its own online store.

However, Taobao.com has already made changes by founding a new website specially for those shops with good credit. And jd.com has started allowing external retailers to open online shops on its website, although that comes together with strict regulation of them. There is still hope for qunar.com and it lies in more strictly regulating its online shops and better serving clients.

That's the essence of e-commerce: Serve your clients well and do not cheat them, because the truth will always be revealed.