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Member fed up with being charged more for Meituan food deliveries

蘋果日報 2020/12/20 05:00


Chinese online food-delivery platform Meituan has been hiking up its service fees for members, according to a viral online article.
In the widely circulated piece, the author claimed to have placed the same order as a member and a non-member through Meituan and found that the app asked for 4 yuan (US$0.6) more as the delivery fee for the member’s order.
He lodged a complaint and was given a 10 yuan coupon as compensation.
The writer said it was not an isolated incident, explaining that once registered as Meituan members, users often faced higher delivery charges for most vendors listed on the app.
In response to the article, Hong Kong-listed Meituan said in a statement that the differences in quoted delivery charges were caused by a positioning cache that had calculated fees based on users’ past locations. The company said it charged customers according to their actual delivery addresses instead of the locations identified by its software.
Meituan, one of the largest food-delivery apps in China, reached 69.85 million daily active users at the end of last year, according to Questmobile.
Some netizens commented that it was quite common for online platforms to charge frequent users higher fees. Some even suggested this might amount to discrimination, which would make the practice illegal.
But since Meituan only promised its members certain coupon offers but not lower service fees, it would be difficult to prove any breach of contracts, Song Yixin, a lawyer from Shanghai’s Honor Law Firm told Chinese media.
Sam Ng, co-founder of social media marketing company Vfluencer, pointed out that online platforms often used big-data analyses to predict consumer behavior and to tailor their offers. Consumers should compare deals from different vendors to find the best offer, he suggested.
The State Administration for Market Regulation has been said to be mulling new regulations of big-data usage by e-commerce companies, such as Alibaba, Meituan and JD.com.
Meanwhile, article 17 of China’s Anti-Monopoly Law forbids business operators with a dominant market position from imposing differential treatments, such as offering different prices, on their equivalent trading counterparts without justifiable reasons.
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