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Image source: Visual China

"Tracking thousands of miles to find customers who only request refunds, and confronting them face to face." On short video platforms, some e-commerce merchants have started shooting such video content. The content is hot and the discussion atmosphere is very lively. Merchants are complaining about only refunds one after another, and some "freeloaders" have caused great harm to merchants operating normally.

This reflects a social fact that the unreasonable refunds caused by the "free-refund party" are causing e-commerce merchants to take it seriously. When the interests of merchants cannot be fully protected, merchants can only adopt such a more cost-intensive pursuit method, which seems to be an expression of the merchants' voice.

Since last year, refund-only has gradually become the basic standard in the e-commerce industry. The market believes that e-commerce platforms have shifted their interests to the user side. After more than half a year, Taobao and Tmall took the lead in adjusting platform policies such as "refund-only".

Blue Whale News learned that Taobao has recently fully launched a new version of the experience system. The new version of the experience system will not only be fully applied to store management scenarios such as Taobao mobile search, homepage guessing what you like, Alimama-related advertising, event registration, etc., but will also provide merchants with more handling autonomy in after-sales scenarios such as refunds, appeals, and abnormal shipments based on experience points. The platform will reduce or cancel platform intervention in the after-sales processing based on the experience points, and the merchants will negotiate and handle the matter independently with consumers.

This means that experience points will become the key to protecting the rights of merchants in after-sales scenarios. Based on experience points, Taobao will comprehensively optimize the existing "refund only" strategy, greatly enhancing the merchants' autonomy while fully protecting their rights. The "one-size-fits-all" approach to merchants in the e-commerce industry is finally going to improve, and Taobao has taken the lead in addressing unreasonable phenomena in the industry.

From Taobao's perspective, it is still practicing the platform's purpose of "making it easy to do business anywhere". Launching experience points and optimizing refunds only seem to protect the interests of platform merchants, but in the end it is still to improve consumer experience: consumers rely on merchants for services to a large extent. By creating a fair and reasonable business environment, Taobao encourages merchants to work with the platform to improve consumer experience.

This can also be seen as the fulfillment of Taobao's "user-first" strategy. From the industry's perspective, when only refunds are implemented in actual operations, unreasonable phenomena are becoming more and more serious, which is a harm to both merchants and consumers. Taobao's "no" this time is to restore the relationship between merchants and consumers to a reasonable and fair state and allow the e-commerce ecosystem to continue to develop healthily.

Why Taobao wants to optimize its refund-only policy

It is understood that Taobao's new experience system mainly covers "store experience points" and "product experience points", and will completely replace the previous DSR (that is, Taobao's previous seller service evaluation system). Before its official launch, the new experience system has been internally tested for several months.

The upgrade of the new experience system provides guidance to Taobao merchants: the higher the overall experience score of the store, the better the search ranking results that can be obtained. "Good service" equals "good growth", and the experience score officially becomes the "hard currency" within Taobao.

The new experience system has also become the basis for the execution of after-sales processes. The most direct thing is that it is directly related to the optimization of Taobao's "refund only".

According to the core strategy given by Taobao officials, 1. For merchants with good service (store comprehensive experience score ≥ 4.8 points), the platform will not actively intervene through Wangwang to support consumers to refund only after receiving the goods. The seller will negotiate with the consumer first. Merchants in other segments will also be given different degrees of autonomy based on the experience points. The higher the experience score, the greater the autonomy; 2. The platform always provides merchants with a fast complaint channel. After the merchant initiates the complaint, the platform will ask a third-party testing agency to conduct random inspections on the goods. If the inspection passes, the platform will compensate the merchant for the loss. 3. The platform will upgrade the behavior recognition model for refund only after the goods have been received, and reject refund only requests with abnormal behavior; 4. For refund only for higher amounts, the platform customer service will manually review.

In short, Taobao's latest policy is to use incentives to encourage merchants to improve the all-round experience of their stores, which not only allows them to obtain more platform traffic, but also gives them greater autonomy in dealing with unreasonable refunds. It is reported that Taobao's "refund only" optimization strategy will be launched on August 10.

The reason why Taobao wants to optimize the platform's refund-only policy is probably due to the "deformation" of this policy during actual operation.

Since the end of 2023, major e-commerce platforms have successively launched "refund only", with the original intention of effectively protecting the rights and interests of consumers. However, in the actual operation process, while "refund only" protects consumers, it is also exploited by some "wool parties". Some users take advantage of loopholes in the rules to make profits, and merchants bear the losses.

This will lead to the formation of a negative cycle, where some people who take advantage of the situation will make merchants miserable. In order to make up for the losses, merchants will inevitably reduce spending on product quality and other aspects, which will ultimately affect the interests of consumers.

The new experience system and the optimization of the "refund only" policy launched by Taobao are aimed at putting a timely brake on the negative cycle in the e-commerce industry. The purpose of the new policy chain punches is to: good merchants operating normally will not be affected by unreasonable factors and refunds only, while merchants that truly harm the interests of consumers also need to be targeted by the refund-only system.

Allowing good money to drive out bad money is the most important direction of this round of Taobao evaluation system reform. This will undoubtedly be a major benefit to merchants in the current e-commerce industry who have been suffering from refunds for a long time.

"Customer first" and "making business easy" are not contradictory

In fact, after Taobao followed up with a refund-only policy at the end of last year, people once thought that Taobao had begun to place more emphasis on consumer interests. This gradually evolved into a question of whether Taobao was abandoning the values ​​it has upheld since its inception, "making it easy to do business anywhere in the world," and was completely turning to consumers and putting "users first" completely.

However, judging from the new policies announced by Taobao in the past six months, they are more aimed at reducing costs and increasing efficiency for merchants, and helping to improve their operating efficiency.

In addition to the above-mentioned new experience system and refund-only policy, the platform has also promoted the following measures in the past six months. For example, during this year's 618 period, the Tmall platform provided merchants with the largest-ever rapid repayment quota. In addition, in the first half of this year, Taobao announced that business advisors, customer service robots, picture space and many other services would be free.

In the fierce e-commerce competition environment, some platforms have completely tilted to one side on the scale between merchants and consumers. Taobao, which has the largest consumer base in China, does not choose this way. It believes that in the triangle relationship among platforms, merchants and consumers, the opposition between any pair of relationships will lead to the fragility of the triangle. Taobao's current practice is to continuously adjust and optimize the platform mechanism to give merchants better motivation to operate well, and ultimately consumers also get better consumption experience and benefits.

There are several other major platform actions that will be implemented later. For example, starting from September 1, 2024, Tmall will officially cancel the annual software service fee of the Tmall platform, further reducing the operating costs of merchants on Taobao Tmall. Starting from September 1, new merchants entering Tmall will no longer need to pay this annual fee. For merchants who have already paid the 2024 annual fee, Tmall will refund them in batches according to Tmall's annual fee settlement rules.

It can be seen that Taobao and Tmall's platform strategies are being updated in line with the reality. In April this year, Taobao updated the rules for freight insurance. For freight insurance orders, the platform can automatically intercept goods in transit through logistics, and merchants do not need to bear the courier interception fee. This time, it was reported that Taobao will upgrade the freight insurance as a whole and will launch a subsidy policy for return freight in more industries, making freight insurance subsidies "normalized" and reducing the after-sales service costs of merchants.

Taobao is also working with multiple parties to crack down on illegal and gray industries to protect the interests of merchants. Currently, Taobao is working with insurance companies, Ant, and the police to crack down on gangs in Maoming, Guangdong, Pingxiang, Jiangxi, and other regions who commit insurance fraud. The suspect in the Jiangxi case has been arrested, and a case has been filed in Guangdong.

In Taobao's view, consumers and merchants have never stood on two ends of a scale, but an organic whole. "Users first" and "making business easy" are a unified whole. Only by allowing platform merchants to operate more smoothly can consumers get a better consumption experience.

From the new experience system, optimization of refund-only, exemption of annual fees for Tmall merchants, upgrade of freight insurance... judging from this series of actions, what Taobao is currently doing is to take the initiative to assume platform responsibilities and lead the healthy development of the e-commerce industry.