24,000 complaints lodged with EU about online purchases

The European Commission said on Friday that over 24,000 consumer complaints about online purchases were lodged via the online dispute resolution (ODR) platform the first year since it was established.

The ODR was launched by the Commission on Feb. 15, 2016 and aims to solve disputes of online purchases in a faster and cheaper fashion.

In these consumer complaints, more than a third of the complaints concerned cross-border purchases within the European Union (EU), according to the Commission, and most of them were about clothing and footwear, airline tickets and information and communication technology goods.

The Commission established and operates the platform as a multilingual web-based IT tool. Thus the ODR platform can be accessed in any of the EU's official languages.

Now, the Commission plans to engage more traders and to further promote the platform among consumers, improve the platform's user-friendliness and monitor whether traders comply with their obligation to put a link to the platform on their website.