Online Sales of Children’s Furniture, How to Buy with Confidence?
At the e-commerce shopping festival in China, sales of household products have hit record highs. Among them, children’s furniture is favored by many consumers because of its diverse styles, low price and convenient delivery service. However, is it safe and healthy for children’s furniture sold by e-commerce? Does children furniture quality control pass? Not long ago, the test data released by the Consumers Association showed that the cribs, children’s study desks and chairs sold on many well-known e-commerce platforms did not meet the national standards.
Low pass rate
The data shows that among the 20 sets of children’s tables and chairs, there are 13 kinds of study tables and 8 kinds of study chairs that do not meet the requirements of national standards. The overall non-conformity rate of the samples is as high as 52.5%; among the 20 crib samples, 16 products do not meet the standards. The non-conformity rate is as high as 80%. Compared with general household products, children’s furniture has stricter requirements on structural design, stability, environmental protection index,etc., so children furniture quality control actually involves every aspect. The national mandatory standard General “Technical Conditions for Children’s Furniture” officially implemented in August 2012 provides detailed regulations on the quality standards and safety requirements for children’s furniture. These labels should apply to all markets and distribution channels, including online and offline.
However, in reality,children’s furniture sold online in terms of materials, sizes, accessories, etc., especially in terms of product quality, often differ from children’s furniture sold in physical stores. Although the online market has become an important channel for the sale of children’s products, the supervision results of many related products are not satisfactory.
According to the survey conducted by the General Administration of Market Supervision on the first batch of four kinds of online products sold in this year, 139 batches of the 463 batches of products were not marked with the name and address of the manufacturer, and the quality was unqualified. For the 116 groups of goods, the overall unqualified product detection rate was 28.9%.
More safety risks
According to national standards, children’s desks and chairs should not have sharp edge tips, there should be no dangerous holes and gaps, and drawer tables should be safe and stable to prevent children from being pinched, sprained, knocked or bruised. This is a mandatory part of process quality inspection. However, the test results for many products show that the safety hazards that endanger children still exist in children furniture quality control.
Why is online shopping for children’s furniture so problematic? Compared with offline channels, online children’s furniture often needs to stand out through price advantage, which causes some companies to sacrifice children’s furniture quality control in order to reduce costs and profit, resulting in inferior products flocking to e-commerce platform.
In addition,compared with the multiple supervision and constraints of offline channels,some e-commerce platforms lack the perfect children furniture quality control review and consumer reporting mechanism, which provides an opportunity for unscrupulous merchants to launch low-quality products on the platform, resulting in the picture does not match the real thing,the return exchange channel is not smooth and other issues frequently occur, this is also current status of Chinese furniture manufacturing.
Increase investigation and punishment
In the sales process of children’s products such as children’s furniture, the e-commerce platform has relevant regulatory responsibilities. The “E-Commerce Law” officially implemented in 2019 has made a series of requirements for the business activities such as the Internet to sell goods or provide services.In addition, at the end of 2018, the State Administration of Markets issued the “Notice on Further Strengthening the Quality and Safety Supervision of Children’s Products”, requiring the e-commerce platform to strengthen the review of online children furniture quality control and increase the supervision of online stores,promptly remove children’s products with quality and safety problems from the shelves, and seriously deal with illegal sellers.
In this regard, in addition to the e-commerce platform to assume regulatory responsibility, manufacturers also need to strictly implement the children furniture quality control, in the front-end production, on the source of inferior products cut off, responsible for consumers.
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