|
Consumerism is a movement that advocates greater protection
to consumers' interests. It is required for informing consumers
about adequate safety standards with a guarantee to provide
quality goods and services and protect their interests.
The growth in the number of online consumers certainly calls
for considerable expansion of protective measures for consumer
safety. However, the uncertainties in the legal issues to
validate and enforce all kinds of online contracts hamper
the growth of e-commerce. Though online consumers are a
still a small group in the vast area of e-commerce, it is
yet to grow as one of the greatest shopping places in the
virtual world.
Most of the people who do business—i.e., either buying
or selling online—are not aware of their rights. This
became evident in one of the researches conducted in Ireland.
The research revealed that most consumers were not aware
of their rights because they did not read the terms and
conditions of the contract or even if they read it, they
were unable to understand it in the right sense of its meaning.
Consumers who are not reading the terms and conditions before
buying goods are as high as 71%. This information gap is
present even when the law is clear regarding the Distance
Selling Regulation Act, 2001 of UK. Under the provisions
of this Act, the suppliers are required to give information
about themselves and the goods and services they offer,
so that the consumers decide whether to buy or not. In this
research, it was also found that 50% of the suppliers did
not provide information about the goods or services and
30% of them failed to provide information about the consumers'
right to withdraw, if they did not want the goods or services
after understanding the terms and conditions of the contracts.
Most of the other consumers did not understand the taxing
system with regard to the goods and services bought and
whether the price of the product they brought included the
taxes or not. It is not surprising to know that Internet
usage is not limited to legitimate businesses alone. Unscrupulous
individuals and organizations use Internet with an immense
scope to carry out illegal activities, so as to make illegitimate
profits or cause personal harm to the users by taking advantage
of their ignorance. Internet has thus become a tool for
numerous scams and illegal activities harming the users
in general and consumers in particular.
The misuse of technology has led to increase in the customer-related
complaints with regard to increased Internet use every year.
As per a recent report by Robert McMillan in the US, online
consumers have filed a millionth complaint, in the Internet
Crime Complaint Center (IC3). The most common complaint
amongst the consumers except for the deficiency in goods
and services is the non-delivery of the goods by the merchants
within the stipulated time. Sometimes, even if the goods
are delivered in time, there are quite a large number of
instances, where merchants do not disclose the charges or
the costs. There are also complaints that there is insufficient
information about the product attributes and inadequate
complaint handling system. Privacy invasion is another complaint
by the consumers, because many marketers sell the data of
their consumers to other marketers without the consumers'
consent. This kind of data sale to the third party increases
unsolicited commercial e-mail and identity theft, and provides
the credit history of the consumer without his consent.
|
