E-commerce firms make headway in stamping out counterfeits

E-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd made considerable progress in stamping out counterfeit goods on its online shopping portal Taobao in 2017, as consumer requests for return of goods fell 29 percent from the same period in 2016, a new report said.

Out of every 10,000 requests made for return of products in the previous year, 1.49 were initiated as consumers suspected they were fake, compared with 2.1 in 2016, according to the 2017 Alibaba Intellectual Property Protection Annual Report.

The report is the first of its kind and was released after Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, proposed "coping with knockoffs in the same way as we cope with drunk driving" early last year. The report said that 97 percent of the products that Alibaba took the initiative to remove from the online platform on suspicion of intellectual property infringement were removed forthwith even before any transaction took place.