Why Does the Alibaba Fair Play Fund Have a Process?

I don't know how many transactions take place on Alibaba.com, but one must assume that there are millions.  Pulling numbers out of the air (STRESSING: I am inventing these numbers), if you figure that there are 10,000 transactions on Alibaba.com that take place per day, that's 3,650,000 transactions per year.  According to Alibaba, less than .05 percent of registered users have reported potentially fraudulent activity.  That is a small, small number.

Let's say that the unfortunate ones who get ripped off don't get a response from the supplier, or something else goes wrong and they lose money.  What do they do?  Well, duh, this Web site is all about the Alibaba Fair Play Fund, a program that was set up to help defrauded buyers get some of their money back.  So there is a way to go about it.  But that's just it.  There is a process.

Alibaba is a big company, but if you work with big numbers, you have to assume that there are a large number of claims coming in to the Fair Play Fund.  If you used my made-up numbers and take .05 percent of the total transactions (as approximated by Alibaba.com), that's still 1,825 potential claims for the Fair Play Fund.  What company could easily juggle 2,000 fraud claims at the same time?

That's why there is a process set in place to establish and verify a claim - no company could possibly have the resources to manage thousands of claims without having a way to collect the right information, attempt to communicate with both the buyer and seller, and determine who has been wronged.  I don't know how much time it takes to process a claim, but according to Alibaba, it can take between two weeks and two months depending upon the complexity of the case.

All of this again tells me that Alibaba.com is doing the right thing by providing due process for both the buyer and the seller, and also by providing a compensation fund for harmed buyers.

There's more information laid our in the Alibaba Fair Play Fund FAQ.