E-commerce firms strive to eradicate harmful products in open market

Lotte ON's mobile shopping platform. Courtesy of Lotte Shopping

By Kim Jae-heun

Local e-commerce firms are working hard to ban the sales of harmful products in their open markets as part of efforts to gain consumers' trust and improve their corporate image, company officials said Wednesday.

Lotte ON, Lotte Group's e-commerce platform, decided recently to ban sales of illegal adult goods, vaping devices and products feared to infringe on privacy. Ultra-small cameras that can be used for making voyeur videos are also excluded from online sales by Lotte ON. The company has also banned the search of any keywords related to the products mentioned above.

“It is our new attempt that we took action first to prevent any sales of harmful products. This can give us a loss to some extent but we want to focus more on selling high-quality protects that benefit our customers,” a Lotte ON official said. “We have even refused to promote heat-not-burn devices on our platform, which are not illegal but for the sake of our customers' health.”

Gmarket is closely monitoring the sales of products on its open market in real time. When a seller gets a warning from the platform for repeatedly posting illegal or fake products for sale, they will be kicked out.

Coupang has also adopted an artificial intelligence-based monitoring system to weed out unwanted products in real time. It provided separate guidelines to adult goods sellers including having to verify purchasers' age. Coupang will suspend or ban the sale of an individual product if the seller does not follow guidelines and fails to make corrections upon the company's request.

11Street operates a “safe trade center” to monitor its open market products. Its main targets are illegal drugs gaining popularity among teenagers and harmful media content banned under the Youth Protection Act.

“We inspect the contents of products that we find inappropriate for teenagers on our open market service. When we find a seller violating our rules, we suspend their business,” an 11Street official said.

E-commerce firms are also urging individual sellers to cooperate with their efforts to eradicate harmful products on open market platforms.

“There are limits to getting rid of illegal and harmful products with only the company's efforts,” a local retail firm official said. “Sellers should also cooperate to conscientiously sell only lawful products.”