After Three Hacking Incidents So Far This Year, Dangdang Customers Not Happy

Everyone likes shopping online — it combines the fun of spending money with the joy of not having to interact with other humans. But shopping online becomes decidedly less fun when you don’t feel your private data is being kept safe, and that’s exactly how users are apparently starting to feel about Chinese e-commerce platform Dangdang.

Dangdang’s problems began early this year, when some users saw their online gift cards stolen, which caused users to lose both the money they’d put on the cards and some of their personal data. Then a similar incident occurred in March. Then it happened again in June.

Needless to say, Dangdang users are not amused. Although DangDang CEO Li Guoqing apparently contacted many of the affected users personally to assure them the issue would be resolved, some say it hasn’t been. “It’s been nearly a month since I filed my complaint, and I still can’t even log into my account,” one user told the Beijing Business Times. This may not be entirely Dangdang’s fault; DangDang customer service has reported these incidents to the police, and may be waiting for them to resolve the cases before reinstating affected accounts. The police, however, don’t seem to be accepting cases that involve stolen sums of less than 1000 RMB ($158).

If the police are the problem, it’s not clear what Dangdang can to to resolve the complaints that are stuck in limbo, but they may need to come up with a solution fast, because there are rumblings online of disgruntled customers banding together to attempt to solve the problem en masse. Whether it’s online or in real life, mass protests are not the sort of thing any e-commerce platform wants. Just ask Alibaba’s Taobao!

The larger issue, though, is why it seemingly continues to be so easy to exploit Dangdang’s gift card system, stealing money and personal data from Dangdang users. If the company can’t fix that problem, it doesn’t really matter if they can resolve the current backlog of complaints or not. No one is going to keep using a website that’s easily exploited by theives for long.

[Beijing Business Times via Sina Tech]