For a long time, Europe has been an important market for Wish, and it is another wing outside the American market.
Recently, Wish has been robbed frequently in Europe, and a wing has almost been broken.
Several French government ministers issued a joint statement demanding that local search engines prohibit the display of the Wish website in search results,All app stores will also remove the Wish App.
In response to government directives, Google and Apple removed Wish from their app stores in France,Google search engine has removed the Wish website from the search results.
Later, Bing, a Microsoft subsidiary, and Qwant, a local French search engine, followed suit.
However, if you enter the (website) address directly in the browser, you can still access the Wish website, but you cannot access it through the search portal of the search engine.
In addition, users who have downloaded and installed the Wish App can use it as usual.
A platform as big as Wish was forced to "semi disappear",This has never happened in France.
This situation directly leads to the loss of a large amount of search traffic for Wish, and third-party sellers can only see the sales slump.
The reason why Wish was so severely punished by the French government is that its platform has serious and widespread product safety problems.
We should start from last year.
Last year, DGCCRF suspected that third-party sellers misled consumers and sold fake goods on the Wish platform.
Meanwhile, the French Ministry of Consumer Affairs launched an investigation into Wish.
The government department purchased 140 different goods from the Wish platform, and found that:
Toy products,95% do not comply with EU regulations, of which 45% can be judged as "dangerous goods", such as animal toys with choking risk;
In electronic products,95% should not have been sold in the EU, and 90% have more or less safety problems, such as outdoor light strings that may leak electricity;
Cheap clothing and jewelry products,There are also risks, 62% of which can be identified as "dangerous goods", containing lead, cadmium and other dangerous chemicals.
Normally, after Wish knows the situation, he should remove these dangerous goods from the shelves or remove them within 24 hours.
However, in fact, these products are still on sale, just changing their names, and some products even come from the same seller (indicating that the relevant seller accounts are not affected).
The survey showed that even though Wish informed consumers that they had purchased dangerous goods, it did not explain the specific reasons for recalling the products.
Therefore, in July this year, the French DGCCRF department notified Wish to comply with European e-commerce and product safety regulations, and gave him a two month rectification period.
Wish said that 150 million products were sold by third-party sellers on its platform,The platform itself has no obligation to control, but there are also a series of measures to promote high-quality products.
However, the French government was obviously dissatisfied with the response and rectification actions of Wish, so it began to demand that search engines and app stores "ban" Wish.
If the Wish is adjusted and effective later, especially in terms of product safety, it may be unsealed.
conversely,"If Wish still does not comply with consumer protection regulations,The French government will escalate the punishment and completely disable Wish in France. Then it will not only hide the Wish website in the search results, "said the French Finance Minister.
It is unclear how much the traffic of the Wish website will be affected.
However, according to the data of SimilarWeb in October,France is the third largest traffic market of Wish, contributing 6.75% traffic share to the website。
Moreover, search traffic is the second largest source of traffic for the Wish website, accounting for 40.5%.
From this point of view, Wish is prohibited from appearing in search results in France, which has a great impact on website traffic. If the whole French market is lost, the impact will be even greater.
Despite the "ban" incident, the total traffic of the Wish website has also declined significantly recently.
SimilarWeb data shows that from May to June this year, Wish The monthly traffic of com was stable at more than 100 million. From July to August, there was a precipitous decline. In October, there were only 50.95 million visits, a half reduction.
❑ Wish earns profits by fines? The seller complained of "seven crimes"
Not only was Wish abused by consumers, but its platform policy also made sellers miserable.
The sellers' complaints about Wish mainly focus on heavy fines, blocking, temporary withholding of store funds, forced use of Wish A+logistics, unauthorized price increase for selling the sellers' products, proprietary competition, etc.
Some sellers reported that "the first payment for goods was temporarily withheld, and hundreds of thousands more were invested, which was frozen for no reason".
Some sellers said, "Wish is addicted to fines. It can make profits by fines. If you exit early, you can stop losses early.".
In recent years, a case about "Wish seller was fined a large sum of money" in Tianyancha information has attracted many people's attention again. In this case, Liu, the seller, was fined more than 20 million by Wish, and his account fund was detained, but there was no way to complain, so he finally chose to sue Wish's subsidiary, Shanghai Weishi Network Technology Co., Ltd.
(Court Judgment)
Liu registered as a Wish seller in 2016.
The cause of the case in the judgment shows that in 2018, the Wish platform sold the products sold by Liu at a higher price without authorization,The part of the price increase is owned by the platform.
At the same time, Liu still needs to pay the sales commission to the platform at 15% of the selling price after the price increase.
Before Christmas 2018, it was in the peak sales season, and Liu's shop had accumulated a large amount of payment for goods.
On the very day of December 13, after collecting the sales commission of Liu's shop, the Wish platform seized Liu's shop on the ground that "inappropriate content was detected in the product", and imposed a fine of about 3.4417 million dollars, equivalent to more than 24 million yuan.
At that time, Liu's account had about 4216000 dollars of unsettled payment, equivalent to about 2824900 yuan, which was kept by Wish.
Another clothing seller reported that he started to do Wish in 2016 and employed 15 operators of Wish stores. At the peak, a certain item of the seller always ranked in the top 100 of the platform, with daily sales between 1000-1500.
Through more than a year's efforts, the seller accumulated 2.3 million yuan in the early 2018 Wish account.
Since 2018, Wish has carried out a lot of fine policies. At first, the seller did not care.
Unexpectedly, these fines regulations of Wish have become more and more absurd, which has led to the decline of funds in the seller's account due to various fines. At the beginning of 2018, there was 2.3 million yuan of payment for goods, and by the end of the year, there was less than 400000 yuan.
After excluding labor costs, the seller has already lost money and had to disband the Wish team at the end of 2018.
(Message from the seller)
In August last year, a seller accused Wish of "seven deadly crimes",
It even wrote about the idea, which resonated with many sellers.
(Source: cross-border e-commerce cross-border housing)
❑ Well known for "low price", the safety of Wish products is questioned
Wish is an e-commerce platform open to third-party sellers. To be more precise, it is the first batch of mobile e-commerce shopping apps.
"Low product price" is the biggest feature of Wish, which is one of the reasons why it is loved by consumers.
On the Wish platform, you may not see many famous brands like "Apple", but you can easily find the priceA $2 smart watch, $7 sneakers, $8 sofa, or even a laptop less than $90,The upper left corner of the product map is marked with the discount range, including half price, 20% off or even less than 10% off.
There are many kinds of products, including food storage containers, garbage bags, tights, bathing suits, hearing aids, drones, sofas, car seats, and many strange products.
The unique algorithm adopted by Wish will recommend the products most likely to place orders to consumers according to their preferences, and it is also marked with words such as "limited discount" and "about to sell out", creating a sense of tension and prompting consumers to rush to buy.
Wish is popular because of its "low price", but there are also many bad reviews, fake complaints and fraud allegations.
In 2019, Vox, a foreign media, reported that after checking the comments in the Wish app, it found that there were a large number of negative comments from users, with many problems, such as goods not delivered, refusal to refund, unauthorized credit card deduction, etc.
Last year, which?, the largest consumer evaluation agency in the UK, bought six products from the Wish platform for investigation, including children's car seats, headphones (two models), smartphones, smart watches and wireless speakers.
The delivery time of the wireless speakers was three months later than the expected delivery date. The smart watches were not delivered at all. The child seats were dangerous goods, the mobile phones were counterfeit Huawei brands, and the two earphones were also imitated from the Bose brand and Apple AirPod.
In February this year, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) found that the electrical products sold on the Wish platform have potential safety hazards, involving curlers, hairdressers, hair dryers, clove shaped scooter chargers, car battery chargers, etc. These products are likely to cause electric shock and fire hazards.
In addition, according to the survey of the French Consumer Affairs Department, there are indeed too many fake products and dangerous goods on the Wish platform, and consumers are more likely to be "recruited". Those products with extremely low prices and beyond the reasonable range are likely to be counterfeit products or dangerous goods that do not meet the safety standards.
At the beginning of Wish, in order to expand rapidly, the seller was allowed to put imitations and ultra-low price products on the shelves. Although supervision has been strengthened in the past two years, on the whole,Requirements and supervision on infringement, imitations and brands are not as strict as other e-commerce platformsThis is the main reason why the quality of Wish products is mixed and a large number of fake and low-quality products are mixed.
❑ With so many slots, how many Chinese sellers do Wish?
Marketplace Pulse data shows that,By 2019, Wish has accumulated 1 million active sellers。
Although Wish is an American e-commerce platform, one of its founders, Danny Zhang (Zhang Sheng, leaving in 2019), is Chinese. In fact, among the 1 million sellers,87% are Chinese sellersThere are only 7% American sellers and less than 1% British and Canadian sellers.
The main positioning of Wish is "mobile shopping app". It once ranked among the four largest shopping websites in the world together with Amazon, eBay and AliExpress.
According to the data of the APP analysis company Sensor Tower,In 2018, Wish became the world's largest e-commerce app with 161 million downloads, more than Amazon.
In the past four years, Wish has been the most downloaded e-commerce app in the world for three years.
According to the financial report of Wish 2020, the platform has more than 107 million active users every month.
Wish has always attached great importance to Facebook advertising marketing, and has also invested a lot of money. According to Sensor Tower data,In January 2019, Wish ranked first in the number of ads displayed on Facebook and InstagramIts Facebook page has launched about 21000 active advertising campaigns in the United States alone.
As one of the leaders of mobile e-commerce, Wish has more apps installed worldwide than Amazon. Although there are many slots, there are still many sellers who want to get a piece of the show and try it out for themselves.
❑ The EU Digital Service Law takes Wish as an example, and eBay should also be vigilant
Next year, France will assume the rotating presidency of the European Council, with the main goal of finalizing relevant science and technology regulations, including the Digital Services Law. Therefore, the Wish platform is used as a model to "open the door" and pave the way for finalizing the law.
On December 15, 2020, the draft of the Digital Services Law was formally submitted by the European Commission.
The EU Digital Services Law is intended to regulate the roles and responsibilities of online platformsTo standardize the obligations of online platforms and digital platforms in combating illegal content, protecting users' privacy and security, and standardizing online advertising, in short, it stipulates that online platforms should manage sellers and their products well, and not sell fake goods, imitations, dangerous goods, etc.
The European Commission stated that,In the field of European digital economy, there are more than 10,000 online platforms in operation, most of them are small and medium-sized enterprises.
There are so many online platforms that need to be regulated by specific laws and regulations.
In fact, the EU formulated the E-commerce Directive in 2000, but the e-commerce market has changed a lot in the past 20 years. It is necessary to strengthen the responsibility and obligation of e-commerce platforms to combat illegal acts according to new rules in the light of the current situation.
From this perspective, the EU Digital Services Act can be seen as the modernization of the Electronic Commerce Directive of 2000.
Moreover, more than 20 EU member states have implemented their own laws and regulations, which has caused great trouble to technology enterprises and e-commerce sellers. These member states need unified digital legislation to standardize the level of supervision and reduce the compliance costs of SMEs.
According to French government officials,This action of "boycotting" Wish is also a strong signal to other e-commerce platforms，Other platforms should also do a good job in "the management of third-party sellers and their products".
Blueocean Yiguan has learned that in recent years, the French General Administration of Competition, Consumption and Anti fraud has checked the goods on sale on various e-commerce platforms every year.
Last yearTop 10 e-commerce platforms in France, a total of choices129 productsThe test was carried out and it was found thatMore than 60% do not conform to consumer protection regulations, and 32% can be judged as dangerous goods, accounting for a high proportion.
Although the French General Administration of Competition, Consumption and Anti fraud did not disclose which platforms had specific number of non-conforming products, the e-commerce websites with the largest number of visits in France last year, including Amazon, eBay and Cdiscount, which we are familiar with, can speculate that many of these platforms also have security compliance problems.
The seller needs to pay attention to product safety, especially in the European market. Product safety is not only responsible for consumers, but also to avoid products being taken off the shelf or recalled due to quality problems, so that the seller and brand can develop in the long run. (New media of cross-border e-commerce - blue ocean Yiguan website domain news)