More than 18,000 consumer complaints have been filed before the Department of Trade and Industry for the first half of the year, including those involving products purchased online.
During DTI’s budget briefing before the House Committee on Appropriations on Wednesday, the agency’s chief, Cristina Roque, admitted that “a lot” of products sold online are “substandard”, prompting the agency to launch the e-Commerce Philippines Trustmark, a digital badge that seeks to help consumers identify legitimate online sellers.
Of the 18,494 total complaints, around 3,500 were mediated, while over 14,000 were endorsed to proper agencies or other DTI offices.
“There’s a lot of goods being sold online that are below standards. So the DTI enforces, monitors all of these. But how can we assure the public that what they’re buying is actually what is delivered to them? So we have established now a trust mark,” Roque said.
“We want sellers to avail of this trust mark so when we see the trust mark of the DTI on the goods sold online, then you’ll say na ‘Ah, kahit paano na-check ito ng DTI’. Because we really try to monitor and enforce, but of course we cannot control everyone, especially the private sector, ang mga online platforms na ito,” she added.
For now, securing the trust mark is “voluntary” for online merchants. But the DTI said it will eventually be part of the registration mechanism for all online merchants.
“Currently, the trust mark program on its face now is still voluntary, because we understand that majority of the online sellers are in household, and we want them to catch up on the system. But eventually, per the internet transactions act, the online merchants, they do have to register with the DTI e-commerce bureau, and it is the trust mark that we will use as the registration mechanism for all these online merchant,” DTI Assistant Secretary Marcus Valdez said.
PROPOSED BUDGET
The proposed budget for the DTI and its attached agencies next year is P12.4 billion, 16 percent higher than the P10.7 billion budget this year. Part of this is the proposed allocation for locally-funded projects under the Office of the Secretary, which declined 27 percent to P1 billion.
“We are hoping at least to increase it further. So that we can use it to market the Philippines worldwide, globally,” Roque told lawmakers.
