Lazada Philippines co-founder and chief executive Inanc Balci said the company does not tolerate suspicious sellers, and will immediately remove their products if found guilty of selling fake items.
"In the event of any exceptional cases of suspicious product being sold on the platform, we take decisive action including investigating the merchant and removing the products from our website," Balci told ABS-CBNnews.com on Tuesday.
Lazada was recently sued by the Philippine distributor of Korean cosmetics brand Etude House for allegedly carrying fake products.
The products were sold through the Lazada Marketplace, a platform for third-party sellers.
Balci said the company removed the seller from the website after conducting an investigation.
"For this specific case, there is an ongoing legal proceeding and we are in no position to comment on the development of the case, but this is how we approach the problem," he said.
He added that Lazada merchants are contractually required to be fully compliant with Philippine laws and are obliged to continually assess their compliance with the laws.
Balci said Lazada has a 24-hour call center to address customer concerns, including authenticity issues.
"We take all feedback very seriously and we have zero-tolerance policy," he said.
The company is also implementing buyer protection and money-back guarantee policies.
"We are not here for the short term, we are not here to make profit out of this kind of [suspicious] transactions. For Lazada to be successful, we need our customers' trust, coming back to us," said Balci.
He noted that in the past, Lazada took down several suspicious sellers as a pre-emptive measure to protect online shoppers.
There are currently no Etude House products being sold on Lazada.com.ph.
But the Philippine distributor of Korean brand Etude House, Rosa Fioure House Corp., said it will pursue the criminal case against Lazada for violations of Sections 155, 168 and 169 of the Intellectual Property Code due to the selling and/or facilitating the sale of fake and/or counterfeit Etude House of Korea products.
The case has been filed before the Office of the City Prosecutor of Makati.
"We are pushing through with the case, we owe it to our consumers," the Philippine distributor said.
Etude House is a Korean cosmetics brand launched in the Philippines in 2009. It now has more than 40 stores nationwide.
Lazada, meanwhile, is owned by Rocket Internet and is one of the top B2C eCommerce market places in Southeast Asia.
source: www.abs-cbnnews.com
