Shoppers looking to buy a pair of jeans or even a wedding gown on Tmall.com now need not fret if the clothes don’t fit. They can simply return them to the seller, without any cost, under Tmall.com’s new “try before you buy” program.
The program, the first of its kind in China, was beta-launched about month ago on Tmall.com, China’s largest business-to-consumer online shopping website. It addresses a key concern shoppers have when browsing online: that the product will not be as advertised or that it won’t fit.
The “try before you buy” model differs from Tmall.com’s standard 7-day return policy because there is no upfront payment at the time online orders are placed. After a buyer receives an item, if she wants to keep it, she has seven days to pay for it. If she doesn’t like it, the item can be returned without consent from the merchant.
To help protect merchants from shoppers who might abuse the program by ordering and keeping expensive items, online shopping data is used to come up with individualized spending caps for every shopper. Tmall.com will also freeze the “try as you buy” option for users who refuse to pay for unreturned goods.
The program is currently available only on Tmall.com’s apparel site. As of July 8, nearly 20,000 products were offered under the scheme with more than 126,000 buyers purchasing 134,000 items. The transaction completion rate was 87 percent, Tmall.com said in a press release.
Tmall.com officials said “try before you buy” could be rolled out to other product categories in the future.
Tmall.com, owned by e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, has been launching other services that add to online shoppers’ purchase and payment options. The site recently introduced installment payment plans that allow buyers to pay off their online purchases of white goods and electronics over 3 months, 6 months or 9 months. The 3-month plan carries no interest rate while the 6-month and 9-month plans have varying interest rates.
The financing program is only open to Tmall.com users who fit certain criteria, for example, they need to be real-name authenticated and they need to have at least a year of shopping history on the platform.
Merchants are not exposed to credit risk because they are paid at the time of purchases by Small and Micro Financial Services Co., a finance company related to Alibaba that includes e-payments provider Alipay. Small and Micro Financial Services acts as the lender and handles installment payments.
