With an overwhelming number of participating vendors for Singles' Day, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holdings crossed out a few sellers from their list because of fear that there might be fake transactions.
The biggest online shopping festival held on Nov. 11 summed a total of 27,000 retailers this year, the Global Times reported Tuesday.
Alibaba, which runs the online selling platform tmall.com, restricted and revoked vendors who may be liable of the fake transactions. The company did manual checks to discover anomalies and immediately sanctioned those involved.
Fake transactions are a marketing ploy done by some online vendors through a deal fraud, boosting their products' popularity. These people hired by the sellers are issued by the shop owners for payment and are sent with empty packages to complete the deal.
However, Alibaba did not name the vendors and the total number blacklisted.
On Tuesday, e-commerce website ebrun.com said that their sources revealed six stores selling shoes, clothes, and bags--including aimigao.tmall.com, fallinmiss.tmall.com and bidegaidi.tmall.com--were removed from Alibaba's list.
The mentioned stores, as counterchecked in a report by the Global Times, are still present at the festival's Web pages.
With the rise of online selling in China, it is inevitable that even small-time sellers do devious activities to gain money.
Lu Zhenwang, founder of Shanghai Wanqing Commerce Consulting, said that fake transactions are done because of high-sale ranking demands in China. Products with high ratings are usually displayed on e-commerce platform homepages.
Even if Alibaba had more restrictions this year, Analysys International analyst Lin Wenbing said that ending fake transactions would still be difficult.
Lin noted that this kind of fraud does not only happen during Singles' Day, but also on regular days where there is an increase in sales, especially at the end of a month or quarter.