Advertisements and products are posted on an e-commerce website (Photo: onlinefriday.vn)Hanoi (VNA) – The capital city of Hanoi has implemented a widerange of measures to facilitate the sustainable development of e-commerceactivities, which have grown rapidly recently.
Though problems persist in the quality of goods traded online, the municipal e-commercemarket is expected to boom in the coming time.
According to a survey of 1,000 enterprises in Hanoi conducted by the Vietnam E-commerce Association, 61 percent haveconducted business activities on social networks because it is an easy andeffective business trend, while it also has low operation costs and offersquick feedback from customers.
About 37 percent of the businesses said that e-commerce revenue accounted forabout 30 percent of the enterprises’ total revenue while 16 percent of themhave gained 50 percent of their total revenue from e-commerce activities.
In the first half of this year, about 7,726 websites and e-commerceapplications of organisations and individuals were registered to operate in Hanoi.
Nguyen Thanh Hai, deputy director of the municipal Department of Industry andTrade, said to promote e-commerce development this year, the department has putinto operation a website on shopping in Hanoi athttp://bandomuasam.hanoi.gov.vn to easily search for prestigious places ofshopping, selling consumer goods and food, and the location of vending machinesin the capital city.
[Infographics: 2018 – Golden time for e-commerce]
Now, the department has developed e-commerce in various sectors, online publicservices, electronic tax declaration and e-payment to create a transparent andfair business environment.
Hanoi has also encouraged businesses to set up e-commerce websites orapplications for agricultural products and food and promoted the application ofquick response (QR) codes to trace the origin of products and goods and printon anti-counterfeit stamps, authentic stamps or similar stamps to preventcommercial fraud.
Nguyen Manh Hung, Vice President of the Vietnam Standards and ConsumerProtection Association, said when shopping online, consumers have difficulty indistinguishing between licensed and unlicensed sale sites and betweencounterfeit and known-origin goods.
Detection, management and handling of commercial frauds via online shopping arevery difficult, because the transactions of fake products lack invoices.Meanwhile, many websites and their transaction accounts on the social networkhave only a virtual address, so it is difficult to control and handlecommercial frauds such as goods lacking quality.
Many consumers worry about these problems when using online shopping platforms.
To protect the interests of consumers, the department has directed relevantstate offices to supervise and inspect e-commerce businesses.
Therefore, they have had administrative penalties worth 3.4 billion VND forviolations in e-commerce activities.
To manage the online business methods, the Ministry of Industry and Trade isdrafting a circular regulating the management of e-commerce websites for mobiledevices and online trading activities.
In cases of violation, the Ministry of Industry and Trade will publicise namesof the e-commerce websites and mobile applications that violate existingregulations as well as names and information of traders or organisations owningthose websites and apps.
According to a report on the Vietnam e-commerce index conducted by the Vietnam E-commerceAssociation, in the past five years, Hanoi was one of two cities having theleading e-commerce index in the country.
In 2017, trading value from e-commerce activities in the city was estimated at 36trillion VND (1.54 billion USD).-VNA
