Beijing 2008 has issued a warning to a growing number of online shops illegally selling Olympic merchandise.
The Beijing Daily reported Monday that according to an e-commerce official from Beijing 2008 the organizing committee discovered about 80 websites illegally selling Olympic merchandise which has caused a decline in sales to its official website www.2008eshop.cn. Sales on the website have dropped to about one million yuan a month during the last two months, from 1.5 million yuan for the first month since it was launched on July 30, reports the Beijing Youth Daily.
The Beijing Youth Daily quoted Xie Funing, a spokesman with the Olympic E-commerce Operation Centre, as saying, “the supply channels on these illegal websites are chaotic”. Many websites lacked legal proof of the origins of their products and others had “exploited consumers’” urgency to buy (merchandise) by raising prices and ripping them off.
The newspaper said some online shops copied the sales page of the official website but changed the contact information to theirs.
Li Yanjun, a BOCOG official in charge of legal affairs, said that these websites would be punished according to the gravity of their profiteering. Li said, “those who have made huge illegal gains will be handed to local public security departments to determine their criminal responsibility”.
BOCOG had set a sales goal of $70 million in merchandising of about 4,000 Olympic products.
