"Inconvenient Online Payment"

There are various methods of settling electronic commerce payments, such as credit cards, online account transfer, electronic cash, charging on mobile phone bills, e-mail banking and etc. However regardless of variety, there are many reported cases of payment failures or double charging on consumers due to system error.

On August 1st, after a survey on 1,575 electronic commerce consumers throughout last year, the Korea Consumer Protection Board (KCBP, http://www.cpb.or.kr) has announced that that 40.3% of their subjects have experienced difficulties or financial damage regarding electronic commerce payment.

Types of consumer complaint and damage are:

△ Charge settlement error due to system failure.

△ False payment charge

△ Double charge

△ Transfer error due to consumers’ mistake (user error)

△ Inadequate refund system.

Especially most commonly reported damage is wrongfully charged payments due to system failure. According to facts, a quarter of consumers (24.1%) who used online account transfer have experienced this. Also consumers who have used electronic cash (19.6%), mobile phone and ARS charges (16.1%) have experienced damage due to system failure.

In cases of double charge or false charge, 4.6% of online credit card, 2.2% of electronic cash, 3.3% of mobile phone and ARS charge users have experienced it.

3% of online account transfer and 9% of mobile users have experienced damage due to user error.

“Volume of online payments have increase greatly but the infrastructure is still inadequate. There should be an improvement on online payment security, standardization and compensation for damages due to system error”, said Kim Sung-suk, senior researcher at Cyber Consumer Center of KCPB.

According to survey facts, consumers use electronic commerce at average of 2~5 times per annum. For payment methods, they use credit cards (77.7% multiple answers), Internet banking (28.9%), mobile phones (19.9%), account transfer through ATM (15.4%), phone banking (11.9%), ARS charge (4.8%). prepaid electronic cash (2.9%), e-mail banking (1.0%) and IC card type electronic cash (0.2%).

To consult damages from electronic commerce, call 02-3460-3000.

Heon-Jin Lee mungchii@donga.com