Taobao Accused SAIC of Unfair Treatment

After being named and shamed as the online shopping site with the most fake goods in China, Alibaba’s Taobao marketplace has stepped up to the challenge, accusing the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC), one of the country’s top watchdogs, of unfair treatment over its random quality inspection.

Taobao, the largest customer-to-customer online marketplace, posted an article on January 27th saying that the SAIC published a misleading report over a “problematic” random quality inspection.

The article, which is claimed to have been written by a Taobao employee, said that the quality inspectors sampled very few items and there is no logic to the report.

The report, which was released by the SAIC on January 23th, said just over 50% of goods bought online are genuine and meet national quality standards.

Taobao marketplace was found to have the worst performance, with only 37.25% of its goods being genuine products, compared with 90% for JD.com and 85.71% for Tmall, a business-to-customer site of Alibaba.

The quality inspection was conducted between August and October of 2014. As many as 92 items from six online sites are chosen for the test, 51 of which were from Taobao.