China has a reputation of commercializing fake items

May 18, 2015 07:03 GMT  ·  By

Kering, a French company that owns some of the most well-known luxury goods from Alexander McQueen, Balenciaga or Gucci, filed a lawsuit against China’s s biggest e-commerce company for allegedly facilitating the sale of counterfeit goods on the online platform.

The lawsuit comes days after the company’s new CEO, Daniel Zhang, expressed his intention of going global and expanding internationally.

This is not the first time Alibaba comes under fire for purportedly listing fake goods on the shopping site. Furthermore, the same company filed a similar complaint back in 2014 but withdrew it after the e-commerce website, which was at the time under the leadership of Jonathan Lu, committed itself to put all its efforts into tackling the issue.

Shortly after, they came up with the Three-Strikes System, which was specially designed to discourage people from selling fake goods online. Just as the name might suggest, the procedure implies that the merchant who commercializes fake goods will first get a warning, then a 7-day ban from the site, and if he continues to sell the products, a definitive prohibition from the site.

Since the efforts do not seem to have paid off, the Paris-based company has taken the decision to reiterate its charges given that Alibaba’s selling of counterfeit luxury products is affecting their business.

Alibaba is accused of siding with the counterfeiters

According to the Wall Street Journal, Kering also accuses Alipay, which is the e-commerce site’s equivalent for PayPal, of knowingly enabling transactions and payments involving the fakes.

Jack Ma, the founder of the company, had also expressed his disapproval of the fact that his company had acquired the reputation of being the marketplace of cheap counterfeit items, but he blamed people’s greed for it.

Even the Chinese government accused Alibaba of not taking the proper measures to stop vendors who use the platform as a means to illicitly make profit from the fake products.

The lawsuit accuses Alibaba of siding with the counterfeiters to increase its financial gains, and they are demanding compensation as well as reinforcing the measures against the vendors.