Local destination: Marketplaces have pointed to inadequate penalties in the new bill
Marketplaces have complained about the inadequate fines that they face in the event of the adoption of the new law "On the Platform Economy" and related amendments to the Administrative Code. According to the industry, we are talking about amounts of up to 278 billion rubles per year. Therefore, business is asking the Ministry of Economic Development, which oversees the drafting of the bill, to soften these standards, Izvestia learned. The adoption of such amendments may lead to a reduction in the range and higher prices, experts believe.
How and for what do marketplaces want to be fined?
Fines for the largest Russian marketplaces for non-compliance with legislation can amount to tens or even hundreds of billions of rubles. Participants in the e—commerce market have warned the Ministry of Economic Development about this. One of them provides such a forecast in materials with proposed amendments to the draft law "On the Platform Economy" and related amendments to the Code of Administrative Offenses. Izvestia has this list of amendments and proposals.
The planned innovations are "extremely vague" and allow marketplaces to be fined 500,000 – 1 million rubles for any violation of the new law: there is no difference in fines depending on the scale of the violation and the harm caused to them, the authors note.
"Millions of orders are placed on marketplaces per day, millions of new product cards are created on storefronts. According to the bill, online platforms will inevitably incur extremely significant costs: according to various estimates, from 41 to 278 billion rubles annually for the two largest marketplaces," the document says.
Market participants call these two largest Russian marketplaces Ozon and Wildberries. However, the Ozon press service stated that they had not participated in the preparation of the proposals, and did not comment on the situation. Representatives of other e-commerce operators interviewed by Izvestia did the same.
The press service of Wildberries&Russ told Izvestia that in the current version of the draft law, the objective side of administrative offenses is not sufficiently defined. The draft law proposes to establish administrative liability for violating any provision of the Law on the Platform Economy. This means that responsibility is not differentiated depending on the severity of the violation and its consequences, the company noted.
— The only special structure that is highlighted in the draft law is the violation of the requirements for the placement of offers for the sale of goods (that is, product cards). For such a violation, the platform can be fined 1 million rubles for the first time, and up to 2 million rubles for repeated violations," the marketplace representative added.
Given the number of product cards and statistics on previously identified cases of cards with inappropriate content being published on platforms, the potential amount of fines for large platforms could amount to tens or hundreds of billions of rubles, the company fears.
They added that it is advisable to adjust the provisions of the draft law on administrative responsibility, establish specific types of violations and reduce the amount of administrative fines.
— Imagine a situation: a marketplace has changed the terms of cooperation with partners, but this information simply did not reach one or more sellers — for example, an email mailbox was clogged. It turns out that for each such case, the marketplace will pay half a million rubles, and it does not even have the opportunity to check whether the organization or individual entrepreneur received the notification on time," said a source in the e—commerce market.
Another example is an incorrectly designed product card: it does not contain information about its mandatory certification, the source continued. The seller is responsible for this, but as a result, the marketplace will be fined, which often does not have the opportunity to verify the correctness of the registration of the "passport" of a particular product, he points out.
Trading platforms are asked either not to introduce (at least temporarily) new fines in the Administrative Code, or to reduce them significantly. It is proposed, for example, to reduce them for legal entities to 50-100 thousand rubles (instead of 500 thousand rubles – 1 million rubles).
Izvestia sent a request to the Ministry of Economic Development.
What are the consequences of fines for online platforms?
If the law on the Platform Economy and its amendments to the Administrative Code are adopted in their current form, marketplaces will have to refuse to cooperate with small sellers and all those who may at least potentially fail to comply with the new requirements, said Karen Ghazaryan, director of the Internet Research Institute. This means that the range of trading platforms may decrease, he believes. In addition, marketplaces are likely to shift the costs associated with fines to sellers — for example, to include them in tariffs - sellers to buyers, which will lead to higher prices along the chain, he notes.
The Association of sellers and manufacturers of household appliances and electronics RATEK considers high fines justified.
— Fines need to be increased, as it is now more profitable for companies to pay some of them than to eliminate violations. It is also necessary to establish real responsibility for non—compliance with all mandatory requirements that are currently contained in the draft law on the platform economy," said Anton Guskov, a representative of the association.
Regulation for marketplaces should be comparable to the requirements that the government imposes on offline retail, and not stricter, says Leonid Konik, a partner at ComNews Research.
— Relatively speaking, if the sale of weapons is prohibited in physical stores, then it is illegal to sell them in an online store. Or a product that is subject to certification or labeling must have an Honest Mark certificate or brand, regardless of the place of sale, even offline or online," he believes.
Marketplaces themselves monitor compliance with such requirements: for example, Wildberries can impose a fine from 25 to 100 thousand rubles for placing prohibited goods, including weapons, Leonid Konik recalled. When working without a certificate of conformity, Wildberries can also fine a seller up to 100,000 rubles, he added.
Unfortunately for marketplaces, they have made many enemies — both among retail chains (which they often bypass both in terms of assortment and prices) and among banks, Leonid Konik states. But from the point of view of consumers, marketplaces provide a huge choice and allow you to buy goods cheaper, and paying through the platform's "pocket" bank allows you to save even more, the expert noted. Therefore, the state must protect online platforms from "regulatory arbitrariness" and the risk of closure, he concluded.
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