Unsafe product alert: be very, very careful what you buy on WeChat

Ecommerce on WeChat, Tencent’s mobile messaging service platform, has really started to take off over the past year. In fact, there are plenty of new startups like Call a Chicken that base their entire business on the chat platform.

But that doesn’t mean that buying from WeChat is necessarily safe, and a recent CCTV report suggests just the opposite. After a young woman named Wen bought a facial cleansing mask on WeChat that left her face covered in pimples, a subsequent investigation found that many of the facial masks selling on WeChat came from illegal workshops using low end products and massive amounts of glucocorticosteroids. Some of the masks tested had six thousand times more of the hormones than is allowed under the law.

The masks sell because those massive hormone doses make them effective in the short-term. In the long term, however, they can lead to serious health conditions including high blood pressure.

The issue betrays a larger problem with WeChat ecommerce: at the moment, it lacks the oversight of a traditional ecommerce platform. As one Sina commenter put it: “Taobao has fake products but at least there’s platform supervision. On WeChat you just have to trust that [the seller] has a conscience. It’s unreliable.”

Given that the platform has just been called out for selling unsafe products on China’s largest television network, though, it’s likely that Tencent may begin to step in and offer stricter oversight of the products that are sold through its platform.

(Source: Sina Tech)