The "E-commerce Law" is officially implemented: 20 million micro-businesses are in full swing for sand

　　Whether it is replacing product brands with code words, hand-painted product pictures, changing them to other transfer channels, or transferring from Moments to Micro Store sales, "Doujing" cannot become compliant.

　　The E-commerce Law stipulates that e-commerce operators must register market entities in accordance with the law and fulfill their tax obligations. Coupled with strict customs inspections, purchasing agents who are used to playing "edge balls" can only find another way out. For purchasing agents who have a certain risk of being "taxed", if you want to seek legalization, cross-border e-commerce is one of the paths.

　　The E-Commerce Law, which lasted for 5 years, was issued after three public solicitation of opinions and four reviews, was officially implemented on January 1, 2019. This means that China's e-commerce industry has entered an era of "laws to follow" and has taken the most important first step to regulate the development of the industry.

　　This law has just begun to be implemented, and its effectiveness remains to be verified, but the impact it will have exceeded expectations. It involves not only consumers and e-commerce industry practitioners, but also affects the domestic Internet market structure.

　　Restless purchasing agents and micro-buyers

　　The promulgation of the "E-Commerce Law" has the greatest impact on purchasing agents and micro-businesses, because the regulations have clearly required e-commerce operators to register market entities in accordance with the law and fulfill their tax obligations in accordance with the law. Whether it is selling goods in WeChat Moments, "bringing goods" on live broadcast platforms, or even merchants on Taobao and Tmall, they are all recognized as e-commerce operators.

　　On January 3, WeChat business seller Ding Ding released his first circle of friends in 2019. The picture only has one QR code, and the text emphasizes that it will only be updated in the WeChat business album in the future. Such a low-key display of the circle is surprising compared to the previous practice of putting beautiful photos of leather bags, shoes, clothes and other products on WeChat Moments to spread the screen every day.

　　"There is no way." It's a few days ago. At that time, the owner of Ding Ding's goods suddenly asked her to withdraw all the WeChat chat content she had just sent and instead place an order on Alipay.

　　Ding Ding told the First Financial reporter: "It doesn't matter if a small seller like me who sells sporadically, but I feel very nervous when doing bulk wholesale. My previous owner said that he had already blocked more than 3,000 numbers."

　　Wechat is one of the e-commerce models that have accompanied the rise and rapid development of instant messaging software in recent years. The "2017 China Social E-commerce and Micro-Business Industry Development Report" released by the China Internet Association's WeChat Business Working Group shows that the market size of China's micro-business industry in 2017 reached 683.58 billion yuan, and the number of people employed was 20.188 million.

　　At present, the mainstream promotion method of WeChat business is to post soft articles on WeChat Moments, but with the various restrictions on WeChat's advertising, WeChat business operators must change their promotional ideas - advertisements in WeChat Moments can only be stopped in moderation, and WeChat business needs to attract traffic for themselves through other platforms. For example: place advertisements on forums or websites, hold some lottery activities offline to attract more potential customers to follow the official account. Most of the spam advertisements of WeChat businesses will be blocked by friends, and in severe cases, the account may be deleted directly.

　　In addition to the huge micro-business group, it is difficult for purchasing agents to be successful.

　　"Xiao Ziwei", who likes to find a proxy to buy pens, told Caixin that she had just received a notice from a store that often buys things that the product would increase its price. In the past, the store did not declare customs for purchases, but in 2019, all customs declarations and taxes have been paid.

　　For purchasing agents, the more intuitive impact comes from customs. Three months ago, the Japanese "newbies" who have been running in Japan and China for a long time began to change the purchasing content from popular Japanese cosmetics products to new brands that most Chinese users are not very familiar with.

　　"Although everyone is not familiar with this brand, they can enter the customs regularly. When the original popular Japanese medicine cosmetics were sent back to China, the customs checked became more and more stringent, which was really difficult to do."

　　In order to avoid risks, Vanessa, who is engaged in purchasing agents, specially sent her customers a reminder: Please do not involve sensitive words when sending WeChat, such as banking, transfer, buying and selling, Alipay, payment, and logos of various brands (using homophones), and emphasized that WeChat does not collect payments.

　　Unlike Vanessa, who still insists on doing purchasing agents, Kiki, who has many years of experience in purchasing in the United States, reminded her customers on WeChat as early as November last year - "I guess the goods will not be sent next month."

　　At that time, more than a month before the official implementation of the E-commerce Act, Kiki decided to suspend shipment of direct US mail packages from mid-December last year.

　　"Whether you can still purchase agents in 2019, let's first observe the implementation of the "E-Commerce Law". If you persist in the future, the most obvious (counselected solution) is to increase prices." Kiki said.

　　In fact, whether it is to replace product brands with code words, hand-painted product pictures, or to switch to other transfer channels, or to transfer from WeChat Moments to sales, the "clever" violation of regulations cannot become compliant.

　　In the view of Cao Lei, director of the China E-Commerce Research Center, in addition to the expansion of the list and the increase in the commodity limits of tax preferential policies, the adjustment of cross-border e-commerce policy also clearly stipulates that the imported cross-border e-commerce retail goods that have been purchased shall not enter the domestic market for re-selling, which will basically not have a new impact on the cross-border e-commerce industry, but may bring about the effect of "rebirth in the ashes" on personal purchasing agents.

　　"Whether it is in the name of an individual or a purchasing agency operating under a company, it is in the 'gray area' and it will be more difficult to operate in the future," he said.

　　Lawyer Dong Yizhi, a lawyer at Shanghai Yida Law Firm, said that since the promulgation of the "E-Commerce Law", micro-business and purchasing agents have always been hot topics, and it can be seen that this industry has actually penetrated everyone's life. From the perspective of taxation, everyone's work and consumption need to pay taxes, and there should be no exceptions for micro-business and purchasing agents; in addition, there are also problems that as an operator but are not within the scope of supervision. This is not only a problem for the operator, but also a problem of backward formulation of policies and regulations and insufficient rigorous access to previous access.

　　"No matter what, micro-businesses and purchasing agents should not be in a lawless place," said Dong Yizhi.

　　The struggle between e-commerce platforms entering the second half

　　Since the situation of each e-commerce platform is different, in order to cooperate with the implementation of the "E-commerce Law", Pinduoduo, Tmall, JD.com and other platforms have made the latest adjustments.

　　As mentioned earlier, the E-commerce Law stipulates that e-commerce operators must register market entities in accordance with the law and fulfill their tax obligations.

　　Pinduoduo issued a document saying that if a merchant who settles in wants to register as an individual business owner, there are two ways: one is to determine an offline business place and apply for registration in accordance with the existing regulations; the other is to use the online business place provided by Pinduoduo as a business place to apply for registration in accordance with the "Opinions on Doing a Good Job in Registration of E-commerce Operators" issued by the State Administration for Market Regulation, and apply for registration.

　　Pinduoduo provides necessary assistance, such as providing merchants with basic information such as proof of online business premises, including the operator's name, ID number, website address of online business premises.

　　Since most of the merchants on the Tmall platform are well-known brands, there is almost no problem of registering market entities.

　　Tmall said it plans to assist merchants in publicizing relevant administrative licensing information through the system starting from January 1, 2019. The merchant uploads the business license and administrative license information related to its own business operations to the platform as required and updates it in a timely manner.

　　根据《电商法》第十六条“电子商务经营者自行终止从事电子商务的，应当提前三十日在首页显著位置持续公示有关信息”的相关规定，京东发布了《商家退出提前30天提醒公告》，京东将调整退店流程。在商家申请退出平台，并且通过审核后，商家店铺首页会给消费者展示退出提醒，内容包含店铺停用时间，及对消费者的购买保障；关店公示期最长为30天，在公示期满后店铺将会停用。

　　In fact, platform responsibilities are full of game in the formulation of the E-Commerce Law.

　　Taking Article 38, paragraph 2 as an example, if an e-commerce platform operator fails to fulfill the review obligations for the qualifications and qualifications of the operators on the platform, or fails to fulfill the safety guarantee obligations to consumers, causing damage to consumers, the responsibilities they should bear will change from the "joint and several liability" stipulated in the third draft to the "corresponding supplementary liability" during the fourth trial, and will be modified to "corresponding liability" when the final approval is completed.

　　After fierce fighting and barbaric expansion in the first half, the e-commerce industry began to gradually enter the second half of the fight. The theme of the second half of e-commerce will focus on meeting consumers' more refined needs.