Alibaba's control room (copyright: Penn-Olson)
Users who fail to register with their real identities by this Thursday will find themselves unable to post new products or update any of their product information. If they still haven’t fallen in step by 2012, they will find their accounts taken down completely. For the moment, these changes apply to all Chinese users on Alibaba’s China marketplace; international users don’t yet need to register with official IDs.
When approached for comment about the changes, Jasper Chan, Senior Manager and Head of Asia Pacific International Corporate Affairs for Alibaba, told us:
We are dedicated to enhancing the quality of information on our e-commerce platforms. This new policy launched on our China marketplace will help further enhance the trustworthiness of our members, further boosting the quality of suppliers, ultimately this will enhance the online experiences of buyers and sellers on our platform.
It seems to be all a part of Alibaba’s new push for security, which even extends to on-site checks of Alibaba ‘gold supplier’ factories – a huge task which will begin next month. The audits will be mandatory, and will examine the production prowess of the suppliers in relation to what they state in their Alibaba profiles.
While real-name systems have met with resistance elsewhere, where there are concerns they might be used to limit speech, the benefits of using a real-name system to combat fraud in e-commerce transactions is pretty obvious, so long as Alibaba is careful to keep users data safe — and careful to track down users who will inevitably attempt to register using faked, stolen, or purchased ID numbers.
[Via Sina Tech]
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