(ECNS) -- More than 100 million useful but unwanted domestic items are being swapped, bartered, and traded online each year as people take advantage of the Internet for better products and lower prices.
Cold shoulder from recyclers
Beijing resident Mrs. Xia planned to replace a set of solid wood furniture she bought more than 10 years ago, but she found no recycling collectors willing to pay a reasonable price for it.
"I was expecting at least 100 yuan ($15), but they offered just 5 to 10 yuan, which is not even enough to buy 500 grams of meat," Xia told the Beijing Daily.
In Xia's opinion, the furniture is still useful, despite the outdated style. However, a recycler explained it costs hundreds of yuan to find people to move, transport, and renovate the furniture, with no guarantee that anybody will want to buy it in the end.
Xu Wei, who has worked for approximately three years in Beijing and now lives in a rented room near Peking University, shared a similar disappointment. She bought a small, second-hand wardrobe for 200 yuan, but a mover refused to fetch the item even if he was paid to do so.
Movers and delivery people are more interested in books, bottles, and packaged boxes, which are easier to carry, while shrugging off old furniture, gas cooking stoves, and electrical appliances.
Second-hand products traded hot online
The Internet has given new life to second-hand goods by meeting diverse demands and quickly facilitating deals.
Wang Ziqi said he spent only dozens of yuan to buy a set of primary mandarin textbooks on the book trading site kongfz.com, after realizing that physical bookstores no longer sell them.
Zhang Lei, who is six months pregnant, has bought parenting books, a pram, and baby toys second-hand on the Internet. She said the prices are attractive and there is the added bonus of hearing child-raising experiences from the sellers.
Seeing the business chances, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba launched a digital flea market called Xianyu (Idle Fish) in June 2014. The platform has enabled the trade of 170 million items since its inception.
Xianyu users can find hot sales zones surrounding particular residential communities or schools, known as "fishponds". More than 30,000 users have sold used items at a fishpond named after Zhongtan Village in Beijing's suburban Changping District. White-collar workers, mothers and students are the most active members in the online marketplace.
There are more than 100,000 such hot sales zones active on the flea market, and large cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou have fishponds with more than 10,000 users. The remote Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Northwest China's Gansu Province also has its own fishpond, primarily for internal use on Xianyu.
On average, more than 200,000 second-hand items are traded and reused every day on Xianyu, the report said.
Besides Alibaba, other players in the digital flea market include classifieds site 58.com, microblogging site Weibo.com, and Baidu Tieba, the online community of Chinese search engine Baidu.com.
Problems with after-sales services
Amid the booming online marketplaces, however, more and more users are complaining of various problems.
Zhang Liyang, who works for a technology firm in Beijing, said he paid 1,400 yuan for a used electronic bicycle, but soon found that its battery was broken. The sellers changed their phone numbers and disappeared, and Zhang said he had to accept it as a case of bad luck.
Besides lack of guarantees for after-sales service, standards regarding to exact age of items for sale are also causing disputes.
Experts say the online flea market is expected to grow further as online shopping continues to develop, but more regulation is needed to protect the rights of consumers.
