Bureau Veritas Participated at the Global New E-Commerce Conference with in-depth interpretation of supply chain auditing of e-commerce platform

August 23 - 25, 2019 Global New E-Commerce Conference was successfully held in Hangzhou International Expo Center. Bureau Veritas, a world well-known testing, inspection, certification and technical consulting institution, has accumulated more than ten years experience in the field of third-party e-commerce. As an invitee to the conference, Bureau Veritas delivered a keynote speech on "Best Practices for Supply Chain Auditing of E-commerce Platform".

Since 2009, China's e-commerce industry has been undergoing rapid development for a decade. With the advent of the era of comprehensive mobile Internet, the continuous improvement of artificial intelligence, big data, all-digital consumption scenarios of the Internet of Things, and the advent of the 5G era, e-commerce development will usher in greater opportunities. The continuous iteration and innovation of e-commerce mode requires e-commerce industry to transform from expansive growth to refined operation.

In order to ensure refined operation of e-commerce platform, the first step is to manage supply chain. Article 27 of the Electronic Commerce Law of the People's Republic of China stipulates that: The E-Commerce Operator shall require operators applying for selling goods or providing services on the platform to provide identity, contact information, administrative license and other authentic information for verification, registration, filing of registration and regular updating. "Supply chain audit of e-commerce platform is an important tool to ensure industrial leadership in the new era. This is not only imposed by laws and regulations, but also the expectation of customers, and enables long-term healthy development of the platform." Liu Yafeng, head of second-party auditing in Greater China of Bureau Veritas, mentioned in his speech.

During e-commerce platform transactions, buyers and sellers interact via the screen, where the risk is more complex and changeable than offline transactions. For cross-border e-commerce, as it is difficult for overseas buyers to gain a deeper understanding of the real production details and product conditions of suppliers, the risk is higher. Seen from the transaction process, the source of risk mainly comes from suppliers. If the quality of suppliers on e-commerce platform can be well managed, the transaction risk will be significantly reduced. Under such circumstances, e-commerce enterprises demand international third-party inspection and certification to measure and evaluate suppliers, so as to build mutual trust between buyers and sellers in e-commerce.

"Supply chain audit can verify the legitimacy and authenticity of registered platform merchants, address the problem of information asymmetry, reduce risk, evaluate the capacity of platform merchants, and ultimately avoid 'bad money drives out good'." said Liu Yafeng.

For sellers on e-commerce platform, enterprises that have been inspected and certified by international authoritative third party can easily win trust from buyers. Liu Yafeng, who is equipped with more than ten years' experience in e-commerce auditing, said, "We will conduct a comprehensive evaluation and audit of the seller's capacity, R&D capacity, supply chain control capacity, quality control capacity, sales or foreign trade capacity, financial health and after-sales service, and produce an audit report in the end." Certified enterprises can put audit reports on the internet. When buyers see these reports, they will know the real situation of the seller's commodities and production process, which enables them to select suitable suppliers conveniently.

At present, global e-commerce is undergoing rapid growth, where there is a lot of potential market to exploit. More and more platforms are turning to third-party organizations for e-commerce audit, which has become a tacit obligation in itself. Since 2007, Bureau Veritas has offered supply chain audit services to business platforms, completed more than 100,000 audit projects so far, and developed a set of mature general audit standards for suppliers of e-commerce platforms.