A few days ago, ** recently issued a public notice on changing the "** Platform Dispute Settlement Rules", which added ** based on the platform's own big data capabilities, identify multi-dimensional combinations, and make provisions for quick refunds or return refunds for buyers who initiate after-sales services that meet the relevant circumstances.
Almost at the same time, JD.com added a new non-returnable implementation standard for refunds in the revised "JD Open Platform After-sales Service Management Rules". According to the rule of "no return and only refund", if the merchant judges that the consumer can be refunded without returning the original product during the review process, it can directly operate the returnless only refund, and the status of the service order will be directly completed after the refund is completed.
In September this year, Douyin e-commerce also updated a rule on "refund only" in the "Merchant After-sales Service Management Specification": Douyin merchants' "product praise rate is less than 70%, and the platform has the right to take measures to support consumers to refund only and return and refund the after-sales application for the product transaction order, and the product praise rate will recover to more than 70% for 7 consecutive days. ”
So far, counting Pinduoduo, which was the first to practice "refund only", several major domestic e-commerce platforms have fully joined the "refund only" camp.
Here's a quick pop of science: In the past, "refund only" referred to the situation where the buyer did not receive the goods and needed a refund. The "refund only" that has attracted much attention today often refers to the fact that after the buyer submits a refund request, the system refunds the money, and the buyer does not need to return the money.
It can be expected that other leading e-commerce platforms are also expected to introduce a "refund only" policy in the future, and "refund only" will soon become an electronic trademark.
Background to the introduction of "refund-only":
E-commerce involution and full competition for consumers
Merchants and consumers are the two core elements in e-commerce operations, and they are opposed to each other and are indispensable. If you ask the e-commerce platform, which is more important, merchants or consumers?
In the past, e-commerce companies considered both equally important. Because, merchants can provide good products and services in order to attract consumers to place orders, consumers feed merchants, and merchants can contribute more advertising fees and commissions to the platform.
Now, as the downward pressure on the economy intensifies, while our production capacity is becoming more and more vigorous, the industry as a whole presents a situation of "oversupply and insufficient domestic demand". In this case, the balance of e-commerce has tilted, and consumers have become more important than merchants.
At this time, e-commerce will inevitably intensify involution, even if it makes itself and merchants suffer some losses, it must compete for consumers.
Therefore, we have seen that a series of regulations issued by e-commerce in recent years, as well as various rules in the settlement of after-sales disputes, are more inclined to protect the interests of consumers, and only refunds are only one of the representative policies. In addition, there are seven days of no reason to return, tasting is not satisfied with the refund, advance payment, fake one compensation three, etc., these policies are for consumers.
How good is the current e-commerce platform for consumers?For example, in the past, if it was not a food quality problem after opening the package, it would definitely not be refundable. And now,Jingdong started with pet food,Test the water"Don't like to eat package return",After the consumer receives the goods,Even if it has nothing to do with food quality problems,As long as the consumer thinks that my pet doesn't like to eat (even if it has eaten a part),You can apply for a refund。
"Towards the consumer" rather than "towards the business" has long been an unspoken rule of all parties (of course, cracking down on professional rights defenders is another matter). "Refund only" pushes this unspoken rule to the extreme and turns it into an explicit rule.
Back to myself. I am an in-depth online shopping user, and one of the things I often do is to buy several pieces of clothing at different stores of an e-commerce company at the same time, try them on when I come back, keep only one piece, and return the others. During this process, I didn't have to pay any shipping costs, and the money was refunded in time. This made me feel both happy and ashamed, on the one hand, I bought the right clothes, and on the other hand, I innocently caused losses to several merchants (the round-trip shipping cost is borne by the merchants).
About "Refund Only".
We need to see both sides of it
When "refund-only" becomes a common rule in the industry, it is bound to cause stronger concern and even wider controversy in the industry (refer to many previous disputes).
In everything, we should see both positive and negative problems and values.
On the positive side, "refund only", on the one hand, does protect the interests of consumers, when the goods purchased by consumers have quality problems, descriptions do not match or do not receive the goods, they can apply for a refund only, no need to return the goods, reducing the cost of consumers' rights protection and time costs. At the same time, "refund only" can force merchants to operate better, showing the development trend of good money driving out bad money. Because in the face of the "refund-only" mechanism, merchants need to pay more attention to the quality of goods and service levels to reduce refund applications. To a certain extent, this mechanism can prompt businesses to improve product quality and improve services, so as to form a good market competition environment.
On the flip side, "refund-only" may also be used by some unscrupulous users or gangs to obtain improper benefits through false purchases, malicious refunds and other means. If this continues, it seems that good money can drive out bad money, but in fact, it will fall into a vicious circle of mutual harm. Small and medium-sized enterprises, which are already struggling to operate, are even more difficult to operate.
These behaviors not only damage the legitimate rights and interests of merchants, but also undermine the normal market order and consumption environment.
Controversy is frequent:
Whether it is possible to introduce AI large models to participate in the judgment
In the past few months, the "refund-only" rule has caused a large number of merchants to be dissatisfied, and there have even been incidents of merchant rights protection.
Many times, platforms are too biased towards consumers and misjudge merchants. Just like a screenshot circulated a few days ago, it shows that a consumer bought chicken feet on a certain platform and received chicken feet. Unexpectedly, on the grounds of sending the wrong goods, only a refund was submitted, and the platform refunded the consumer as soon as possible. Merchants want to cry without tears, and there is nowhere to redress grievances. Even if this kind of consumer buys a husband and wife lung tablets, the merchant shall not pay for death
All kinds of miscalculations are too numerous to mention. Even, sometimes the platform is too lazy to judge, as long as the consumer mentions only a refund, it will be indiscriminate and pass the refund application as soon as possible.
So. In the current trend of "refund only", how to reduce misjudgment as much as possible to find the greatest common divisor of the development of consumers and businesses?Generally speaking, the platform can invest more manpower to manually review one by one to clarify whether it can be "refunded only", and at the same time take a series of measures to prevent and combat the behavior of the wool party, such as strengthening transaction supervision, improving the refund mechanism, establishing a blacklist system, etc.
A friend also mentioned to me the possibility of AI judgment, and I thought it was a good idea. Because with the rapid development of AI large models, its judgment ability in many fields has surpassed that of humans.
The core capability of the AI model is that it can learn from massive historical data and automatically extract key features related to the "refund only" policy. These characteristics may include the consumer's purchase history, the frequency of refunds, the reason for the refund, the credibility of the merchant, the quality evaluation of the product, etc. Through in-depth analysis of these characteristics, the AI model can build a sophisticated decision-making model that can be used to determine whether a transaction meets the "refund-only" policy.
The advantage of large AI models over human judgment lies in the speed and accuracy with which they process large amounts of data. When dealing with complex problems, humans are easily affected by subjective emotions, fatigue and other factors, while AI large models will not be interfered by these factors and always maintain stable and efficient judgments. In addition, the AI model can also improve the accuracy of its judgment through continuous learning and optimization, and gradually adapt to various complex trading scenarios.
In short, the introduction of AI large models to judge the applicability of the "refund-only" policy can not only greatly improve the accuracy and efficiency of judgment, but also significantly reduce the misjudgment caused by human factors. This means that e-commerce platforms can more accurately implement the "refund-only" policy, which not only protects the rights and interests of consumers, but also protects the interests of merchants. At the same time, through the automatic processing of AI large models, e-commerce platforms can save a lot of labor costs and invest more resources in improving user experience and service quality.
At the end: the "refund-only" trend has spread to other industries as well. For example, Xibei, a catering company, announced that it would take out 30 million yuan in 2024 to implement the policy of "return if you are not satisfied with food".
A friend of mine suggested that the "refund only" policy should also be implemented, such as buying one, and if you are not satisfied or lose money, you can always return the original principal. --It was a joke, of course, and his suggestion was met with laughter.