Recently, the Beijing Dongcheng District People's Court made a significant ruling concerning Dangdang. In 809 cases, the court determined that the majority of orders signed by consumers and Dangdang but not confirmed by Dangdang were not established. However, for a smaller portion of orders where Dangdang had sent confirmation emails regarding the shipping status, the contracts were deemed effective. This case, which arose due to manual entry errors leading to order cancellations in the e-commerce field, has garnered much attention as it provides information and reference for handling similar future events. Through the first-instance verdict by the Beijing Dongcheng Court, part of the consumer’s litigation request was supported, but most were not. From a legal judgment perspective, there was no absolute winner.
The court categorized the canceled orders from Dangdang into two types: one class involved consumers who placed orders with Dangdang, received confirmation of delivery, but the items were never shipped and later canceled; the other class involved consumers whose orders were not confirmed by Dangdang. For the first category, the court ruled that the contract was established, favoring the consumers. For the second category, the court acknowledged that Dangdang did not confirm the orders, thus the contracts were not formed, and consumers could not demand compliance from Dangdang. In this sense, Dangdang’s actions were supported by the court.
Another signal revealed in this case is that the development of online retail inevitably involves mistakes such as corporate manual input errors. Looking back, this kind of incident has happened more frequently. If all such errors were to hold e-commerce enterprises liable, it would be too strict and would not align with the rule of law, nor would it be conducive to the development of the e-commerce industry. The judgment of this case identified whether or not a confirmation email was issued as a determining factor for whether the contract takes effect, following the trading rules. If companies did not issue a confirmation email, the contract could not be established. Overall, Dangdang's behavior in this case has been widely recognized by the court.
Additionally, public opinion towards e-commerce businesses in society also shows tolerance, creating an objective and rational evaluation environment for the e-commerce industry. In this regard, Dangdang has made its due contribution.
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(Note: The text includes repeated product names and seems to have some irrelevant parts mixed in. I've focused on translating the coherent sections.)