A tragedy in an online shopping

Two weeks ago, China's online shopping software, Taobao, had a serious incident. (I explained what Taobao is in a previous article, and you can directly understand it as the Chinese Amazon).

A video blogger with 550, 000 followers named "passer-by A" (his video was posted on a website called Bilibili, which can be understand as Chinese Youtube) discovered that one seller on Taobao had mislabeled the price of an orange and accidentally changed the price of an orange from 26 yuan per 5,400 grams to 26 yuan per 4,500 jin (1jin=1/2 kilogram).

According to people's common sense, it is impossible to get only 26 yuan for 4,500 jin of oranges. However, the video blogger did not choose to remind the owner or leave the purchase page. Instead, he led ten thousand fans, each of whom bought a lot of oranges. Tens of thousands of orders a night, involving up to 7 million yuan. 

However, the video blogger and his fans also know that tens of thousands of orders, each with 4,500 jin of oranges, are absolutely impossible to deliver, so he directly led his fans to complain about the store. According to Taobao's rules, if a complaint is successful, the buyer will receive compensation from the seller, so each person received 400 yuan in compensation. When Taobao sellers set up the shop, they will have a deposit of 100,000 yuan, which can be used to pay compensation to buyers. However, the compensation of 400 yuan for each 10,000 people is obviously not enough, so the sellers need to pay their own money to compensate these buyers.

Unable to bear the burden, the store posted a statement directly on his Taobao store, basically saying that it hoped the video blogger and his fans would bypass him and forgive him for his previous technical mistakes, and that he was unable to pay the compensation amount. But the result was ther'es so many unsolved complaints so the orange shop forced to close. 

It was the most serious episode to date, but the video blogger's actions were not uncommon. Taobao often has promotions large and small, so a group of people get together to study each offer and snap up the coupons together, causing the seller to lose money. Like the same shops selling oranges, lots of online seller manage their online stores with just a few workers, so there are also many stores wrong price of the product, or wrong promotion price, cause many people gathered together to buy the goods. The problems exposed by these incidents are still the imperfection of Taobao's policies, and there is no solution to this situation so far.