DgcityBeijing Internet Court has handled 35,869 contract disputes involving online services since it opened in 2018, and the caseload keeps climbing, the court said on Tuesday. Roughly 60 percent come from online shopping and another 36 percent involve livestreaming, the two engines of Chinese e-commerce.
The disputes no longer revolve only around knock-offs and defective goods. The court cited merchants misusing customer data, rows over how platforms label artificial-intelligence-generated content, and arguments over the boundaries of platform power. As one court official put it, platforms now act as both market operators and referees, and lawsuits are forcing judges to decide where their rule-setting authority ends.
The court’s approach balances the two roles. It respects platforms’ autonomy to write their own rules but blocks them from infringing users’ rights under the banner of self-governance, while trying not to intervene so heavily that it discourages new business models. Platforms were also warned against leaning entirely on automated systems to police content, with a reminder that human review of content and data practices remains their responsibility.
Livestream commerce has pushed hardest at the old rules. Hosts, merchants, platforms and the producers behind a brand can all play a role in a sale, and buyers who receive goods that never matched the pitch have struggled to identify who is answerable. The rising case count is pushing platforms to refine rules on returns, merchant qualifications and host conduct.
For consumers, the practical message is that contracts formed through an app or a livestream are real, reviewable agreements, and that platforms cannot hide behind terms written entirely for their own convenience.
Beijing Internet Court is one of three specialist internet courts set up to handle cases that live entirely online, alongside ones in Hangzhou and Guangzhou. Its judges accept electronic filings and can replay the actual checkout flow, chat records and livestream clips as evidence, which makes rulings more precise but also exposes how quickly the underlying business changes.
The figures underline the scale of the market those courts police. China’s livestream commerce sector runs into the trillions of yuan in annual sales, and shopping through short-video feeds has become routine for older users as well as the young. Each new format, from group buying to flash sales hosted by celebrities, tends to arrive first and generate disputes only later, leaving courts to define the rules after the fact.
