Legally secure online commerce: A Japanese company shows us how – rakuten.de

Ever heard of Rakuten? No? The Japanese company operates under rakuten.de in Germany and according to its own information unites around 5,000 rental shops with almost 10 million items, thus positioning itself as a serious competitor to eBay & Amazon. Japanese Rakuten Inc. is something like Asia's Amazon and in 2011 acquired a majority stake in the German e-commerce platform Tradoria. The company is likely to soon outpace the market leaders in online commerce, who are entrenched in legal (Amazon) or every respect (eBay). The reasons for this are obvious.

Amazon and eBay are struggling with self-inflicted difficulties. In the meantime, eBay has become so deeply entangled in questionable risk avoidance, account suspension and fee maximization practices that we receive daily reports of eBay merchants whose accounts have been suspended, who have been kicked off, and who have been stripped of control – merchants who actually just want to conduct their business in peace and sometimes find themselves facing ruins from one day to the next. Amazon fails to provide its merchants with a legally secure platform on which they can meet all legal requirements and thus trade safely. To this day, it is not possible to integrate terms and conditions and withdrawal instructions – essential requirements for online merchants – in such a way that they are actually incorporated into the contract or fulfil their purpose. In practice, as things stand today, every Amazon shop can be crippled by a malicious competitor with a knowledgeable lawyer. This applies, thanks to the hybrid landing pages, to most eBay shops as well – even after partial implementation of the improvements we suggested improvements.

From a lawyer's perspective, building one's livelihood on sales activity at eBay or Amazon is thus dangerous to potentially existentially threatening. For many merchants, legal costs are higher than turnover because these billion-dollar companies fail to take care of their customers and their legal interests.

However, if one looks around rakuten.de even only superficially, a small merchants' paradise reveals itself. Rakuten is a better mix of eBay, Amazon, traditional online shop – and legal protection insurance. Beyond that, Rakuten also understands itself as a service provider, which is completely lacking in the market leaders. Anyone who has ever tried to solve an individual problem with them, for which no suitable standard text modules exist, knows this.

The platform is organised as a large department store with thousands of shops that can be rented for a monthly flat rate. The shops can be operated both as stand-alone solutions and as part of the visitor-rich platform. The provider not only provides the technical framework but also the legally required content such as terms and conditions and withdrawal instructions for all shop operators uniformly. The order process is – in contrast to Amazon – designed in such a way that all necessary information is incorporated at the right place and thus is largely legally secure (at least in formal terms). Thus, the biggest problem of all online merchants is elegantly solved. Hardly any of them move safely in this terrain – unless they have also had legal training.

I did not look at the texts in detail. However, even at a cursory professional glance, it becomes apparent that something is being done differently here. While errors are also not excluded at Rakuten, what is crucial for merchants is that everything possible is being done for their legal security and Rakuten assumes full liability for the terms and conditions and mandatory information provided. In the event of a warning letter (Abmahnung), this includes full cost coverage for the merchant's own legal counsel and, if the case is lost, also for the opposing lawyer's fees. Wow! Why can't or won't the competitors do that?

No, I am not being paid for this completely independently written article. It is simply the case that in the meantime all internet-savvy lawyer colleagues I know (myself included) have started to advise their clients against doing business at eBay or Amazon for legal and/or factual reasons. We are, so to speak, thirsting for alternatives where we don't have to be annoyed every day about legal inadequacies and the associated difficulties for our clients, but can instead take care of their actual problems.