Attention Merchants! The Guidelines for compliant fee practices on online trading platforms are here.

Journalists learned today that the State Administration for Market Regulation issued and implemented the "Guidelines for Compliance of Fees in Online Trading Platforms" on July 31, further regulating the behavior of online trading platforms in charging commissions, fees, membership fees, technology service fees, information service fees, marketing and promotional fees to operators within the platform. The "Guidelines" clearly outline the principles that platform fees should adhere to, advocating for reducing the burden on operators within the platform, strengthening platform compliance and self-discipline, and standardizing platform fee practices. The "Guidelines" require platforms to implement the responsibility of compliance management, establish a sound compliance management organization, equip compliance management personnel, promptly internalize regulatory systems as compliance systems, establish a risk identification and evaluation mechanism for unreasonable fee practices, strengthen the construction of a compliance risk prevention mechanism for pre-approval of unreasonable fee risks, enhance compliance training, and create a compliance culture. The "Guidelines" specify the obligation for platforms to publicize fee rules, requiring platforms to continuously publish platform fee service agreements, transaction rules, and other information prominently on their homepage. It clarifies that any modifications to fee rules must be publicly solicited for opinions in accordance with the law, and specifies the retention period for historical versions of fee rules, requiring platforms to keep all historical versions of fee rules from the effective date of the modified version for the previous three years. The "Guidelines" stipulate that platforms are not allowed to charge operators within the platform repeatedly, charge fees without providing services, provide inadequate services, shift costs that should be borne by the platform itself onto operators, charge for providing basic business data to operators within the platform, force or coercively participate in promotion or sales activities and charge fees, use unreasonable deposits to indirectly charge fees or increase fee standards, and practice price discrimination against operators with the same trading conditions.