Gmarket Frustrates Foreign Customers
By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
The freefall is continuing for the Korean won, but that hasn't been entirely bad news for local online shopping sites, which are enjoying increasing sales from bargain hunters overseas.
Whether the companies are ready to handle the surging international traffic is a completely different matter, with complaints growing over the quality of English information on the sites.
Gmarket (www.gmarket.co.kr), the country's leading auction site and Internet retailer that is soon to be absorbed by American Internet giant eBay, has benefited from the value of the local currency, plummeting to new lows, with consumers from the United States, Japan and other countries taking advantage of their spiked buying power.
According to company officials, the number of transactions among customers in foreign countries reached 618,000 in 2008, representing an 82 percent increase from 2007. The increase in overseas orders has been accelerating recently, with deals in December representing a 154 percent growth year-on-year, Gmarket said.
However, buying products on Gmarket isn't exactly a pleasurable experience for non-Korean speakers, who claim that the company is neglecting to provide them with the necessary information to get the right product at the right price.
``It's good that Gmarket takes orders from foreigners, but I don't think I will ever place an order without a Korean friend helping me,'' said Brian Colman, a Seoul-based American who says he finds Gmarket's English site lacking.
``The English site provides general information and tips on its FAQ box, (but) I needed translation anyway as many of the purchase options are still written only in Korean. And although there seems to be more items on the English site now, it still seems that its easier to find things on the Korean site.''
Foreign customers are also frustrated because the company's e-mail updates about payment, shipment, delivery tracking and refunds are provided only in Korean. The information about duties and value-added taxes of individual items are also not provided in English, which often has buyers caught off-guard by eye-popping bills.
Local media reported a case of a Seoul-based Israeli customer purchasing a baby carriage on Gmarket for his pregnant wife, only to learn that he will have to pay another 130,000 won (about $87) in delivery taxes.
Gmarket responds that it has notified foreign users of duties and taxes in the question-and-answer section of its English page. Being a customer-to-customer commerce site, however, it would be tricky for Gmarket to enforce sellers to provide more detailed information in English.
U.S.-based customers accounted for the largest part of Gmarket's foreign orders last year, followed by those in Japan and China, the company said.
Orders from U.S. customers reached 90,000 in the fourth quarter of last year, which represented a 115 percent increase from the previous quarter.
Orders to Japan also jumped 100 percent quarter-on-quarter to 44,000 during the September to December period, the company said.
Although much of the company's foreign-based customers are Korean students and businessmen living abroad or ``gyopo (naturalized Koreans),'' non-Koreans account for about 30 percent of orders, the company said.