Some thoughts: The duty of online retail platforms

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After reading an article about "Taotian launching Return Protection to counter involution," I'd like to share some thoughts.

Comparison between Shipping Insurance and Return Protection
Shipping Insurance
Nature: An insurance service provided in collaboration with third-party insurers.
Features: Regardless of whether the buyer genuinely made a purchase, claims are paid as long as returns occur, which can easily lead to "coupon abuse" behavior.
Current status: Although the platform claims Shipping Insurance won't be phased out, new stores often find it difficult to activate Shipping Insurance and are instead guided toward Return Protection.
Return Protection
Nature: A service officially launched by Taobao.
Features: Can identify malicious orders based on buyer behavior, reducing return costs and improving consumer experience.
Future trend: As Taobao promotes its official services, Shipping Insurance may gradually exit the market, with Return Protection becoming mainstream. Currently, some stores can no longer activate Shipping Insurance.

So, this is a shift from third-party Shipping Insurance to an in-house Return Protection, incorporating better risk control strategies to prevent adverse selection costs. It's a broad platform product improvement. The short-term impact on demand is minimal, but some suppliers should see clear cost reductions and fewer hassles.

Notably, the common narrative is: If merchants have no profits, they pass negative feedback to consumers; if they have profits, they protect consumers. However, during the years when Colin Huang was operating Taobao stores, he observed cases where "merchants wouldn’t improve consumer experience even if they earned excess profits through the platform."

Whether to favor consumers or merchants is a matter of timing. Under different circumstances, the party with higher opportunity costs gets the advantage—this is basic business logic, not a fixed target. Platforms pursuing balance may seem politically correct but risk losing competitiveness by being too dull. An imperfect analogy: Like post-WWII China's land reform, balancing farmer and landlord interests would weaken competitiveness. The example isn’t perfect, but you get the idea.

E-commerce competes on service because purchasing power is scarce and supply is excessive. In the early PC internet era, just having products to sell was enough—no one competed on service. The decline in return barriers and rising return rates stem from collapsing consumption, platform competition, and oversupply. Rising operational costs for merchants are mainly due to weak supply competitiveness. Blaming rising costs like return rates and passing them to consumers is a monopoly-supply scenario under planned economies. In reality, platforms should improve capabilities to identify and phase out merchants with high costs and poor product design. If merchants pass losses to consumers undetected, the platform is failing.

Whether merchants offer basic products to reduce returns or raise prices is a free-market 博弈 process. Since supply isn’t monopolized, consumers can choose.

A healthy online shopping ecosystem may be the ultimate goal. Differences in approach or pace are the main 争议 and 分歧. Fair paths and healthy rhythms are widely desired, though they may sacrifice competitiveness and efficiency.

If a platform can’t balance squeezing low-opportunity-cost merchants while ensuring 供需匹配 efficiency, its competitiveness will decline. As mentioned earlier, if merchants start scamming consumers due to low profits and the platform does nothing, it’s game over—consumers will eventually leave.

Thus, this clarifies a platform’s duty: maximizing 供需匹配 efficiency. This is its core responsibility.

Ideally, platforms should aggressively 博弈过剩 supply，筛选出优质供给，淘汰低效过剩供给，提升供需匹配效率。The biggest pitfall is "platform governance failures leading to 劣币驱逐良币，长期损耗匹配效率."

⚠️ Risk reminder: This is just a record of research and thoughts. The author strives for substance, but not all ideas may be correct. Take what resonates. ——Trudy Dai DEMO