Agencies join forces to regulate online traders
WITH THE growing popularity of online trading, the Department of Business Development (DBD) has joined forces with the Electronic Transaction Promotion Agency (ETDA) to regulate online traders in a bid to prevent unscrupulous practices.
Rattana Theanvisitskool, deputy director-general of the Business Development Department, said the department and the ETDA will set up a taskforce to monitor and categorise online traders to protect consumers.
Cheating complaints
“The two agencies will deal with complaints of cheating from consumers and investigate so that the government will be able to enforce existing laws to regulate and control online traders,” she said.
Under the cooperation, the Information and Communication Technology Ministry’s ETDA and the Commerce Ministry’s DBD will carry out a thorough investigation of the trader under complaint, based on its IP and domain name, and laws will be enforced if it is found guilty.
On the other hand, the two agencies will present e-Commerce Website Award to traders who are reliable, creative, and have a high standard of operation.
The ETDA expects the number of online traders to keep growing in the following years, boosting the online trading value by 17.5 per cent in the next five year to more than Bt2.8 trillion a year.
Ratthasat Korrasud, senior director of ETDA , said the value of e-Commerce in Thailand in 2020 is expected to reach more than Bt2.5 trillion, up by 17.5 per cent from last year’s figure.
Total value of the e-commerce market in Thailand last year is expected to increase by 3.65 per cent year-on-year to Bt2.11 trillion. For this year, trading is expected to reach Bt2.2 trillion.
Of the total trading last year, most fall under the category |of business-to-business worth about Bt1.23 trillion in value, followed by business-to-customers, about Bt410 billion, and business-to-government, about Bt390 billion.
