China adopts real name registration for online business

Online shop owners in China will have to submit personal information, including real names, contact numbers and addresses, to eCommerce agents before they could run their businesses online.

The regulation about online shop retailers

The regulation issued by the State Administration for Industry and Commerce will be immediate effect on today. It prescribes details on the obligations of online shop retailers and eCommerce agents, and expatiates authorities' administration functions of online shopping.

This comes as an effort to prevent fraud. If the online business owners fail to abide by the regulation, they may be fined of up to 30,000 yuan.

The official regulations make no mention of registration fees. If the fees were to be at online retailers' expenses, the price of their products may go up.

China's eCommerce market booming

Chinese eCommerce market is developing very fast. According to the government, in 2009, China's online shopping population hit 100 million and the trade volume of e-commerce surpassed 3.6 trillion yuan (approximatively $525 billion). See our post about figures of eCommerce in China.

Among the main actors in the Asian market, we can quote the B2B platform Alibaba, Taobao which recently joined forces with Yahoo to launch the world's largest cross-border eCommerce platform, and the Japenese platform Rakuten which teamed up with Baidu to launch an eCommerce platform in the end of the year.