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| A screen capture of Coupang's website on Wednesday shows a T-shirt is out of stock. |
By Nam Hyun-woo
E-commerce firm Coupang is under fire for its belated notification of a critical failure in its app, which displayed incorrect information for four hours Wednesday that all products on the platform were sold out.
According to Coupang, orders and purchases were shown as unavailable on its app from 7 a.m. as it listed all products as out of stock. The app showed sold out messages for apparel and food products and an out-of-service message popped up for tickets for concerts and other events.
This confused consumers as the company did not acknowledge the failure until 1 p.m. when it sent a statement to reporters. In the statement, Coupang said it had been fixing the error since 11 a.m., but a number of services were still malfunctioning and it would take time before the service was fully restored.
"We found technical issues in our inventory database as the reason for the failure," Coupang said in the notice. "We apologize for customers' inconvenience and will do our utmost to prevent any difficulties with our services."
However, the company had not posted a notice for customers on its app or website as of 3:30 p.m.
This not only inconvenienced Coupang customers but also angered sellers who use the platform.
"Shouldn't Coupang compensate sellers for their daily average sales?" a seller wrote on Seller Ocean, a domestic online forum of merchants selling products online. "I have lost a day's sales, but nothing was fixed after lunchtime."
Another member of the forum wrote, "I was surprised because today's orders were less than half the average," while one more said "Coupang should feel more responsibility for sellers' losses."
Coupang experienced an error in its server last November when the cloud service of Amazon Web Service failed. The error made online shopping impossible through Coupang, Market Kurly and others using the cloud service.
This is expected to be an additional blow to Coupang, which has been suffering from a boycott of Japanese products by domestic consumers.
A number of online postings listed Coupang as a boycott target, because the company's largest shareholder is Softbank Vision Fund, led by Softbank Chairman Masayoshi Son. Coupang said this was an unfair allegation because it was established and is operating in Korea and has created more than 25,000 jobs here.
