Editor’s Note - DCC.
On July 4, 2026, the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) and the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) released the Draft Amendment to the E-Commerce Law (中华人民共和国电子商务法（修正草案征求意见稿）) for public comment. Comments are due August 4, 2026.
The WeChat item archived for this brief is a repost from the SAMR website. DCC cross-checked it against the public notice as carried by The Paper, and against the Xinhua Q&A by the SAMR Online Transaction Supervision Department and MOFCOM E-Commerce Department officials. This is a brief of the consultation and official explanation, not a full article-by-article translation of the draft PDF.
The one-line read
This is not just a clean-up of the 2018 E-Commerce Law. The draft tries to move the statute from marketplace transaction law into platform-economy governance law.
That shift matters for data-compliance teams because China’s platform rules no longer sit in a separate consumer-protection or market-regulation lane. The same platform governance stack now carries personal-information protection, network and data security, algorithmic and rulemaking fairness, merchant governance, worker protection, competition policy, and outbound platform strategy.
The consultation
The draft amendment has 20 articles. The official notice gives three feedback routes:
- through the SAMR website “Interactive - Consultation and Survey” channel, or the MOFCOM website “Interactive Exchange - Solicitation of Opinions” channel;
- by email to dzswf@samr.gov.cn or dzswf@mofcom.gov.cn; or
- by postal mail to SAMR’s Online Transaction Supervision Department or MOFCOM’s E-Commerce Department.
The feedback deadline is August 4, 2026.
Why revise the E-Commerce Law now?
In the official Q&A, the regulators give four reasons.
First, platforms are described as the key actors in the platform economy, with a strong social attribute. The law needs to strengthen platform social responsibility and better balance platforms, in-platform operators, workers and consumers.
Second, platforms are both business operators and managers of online markets. The regulators want a fuller platform liability system that presses platforms to strengthen compliance and helps other market participants build a healthier online market environment.
Third, the policy frame is industrial upgrading: the draft is meant to move platform economy participants from “traffic first” and price competition toward innovation and quality.
Fourth, e-commerce is treated as a field for institutional opening. The draft is intended to add or improve provisions on open cooperation, industry self-regulation, countermeasures, consultation and dispute resolution, so that Chinese e-commerce businesses can expand abroad in a more orderly legal environment.
The five change vectors
The official notice and Q&A describe the draft through five directions:
| Direction | What changes |
|---|---|
| Expanded scope | The law would no longer focus only on platforms and in-platform operators; it would further define rights and obligations of other platform-economy participants. |
| Platform responsibility | The draft enriches regulatory tools beyond fixed fines and orders to suspend business for rectification, building a more graduated responsibility system. |
| Integrated supervision | Cross-sector platform operations would be supervised through a more coordinated mechanism, including consistent rules for online and offline business, stronger department coordination, and central-local coordination. |
| Prominent illegal conduct | The draft targets recurring e-commerce violations that have generated strong public concern. |
| Open cooperation and outbound protection | It pushes alignment of rules, regulation, management and standards with international practice, strengthens industry self-discipline, guides orderly outbound expansion, and adds countermeasure tools to protect enterprise rights. |
What DCC is watching
1. “Platform” becomes a governance position, not only a marketplace role
The original E-Commerce Law was built around electronic-commerce operators, especially e-commerce platform operators and in-platform operators. The draft’s scope language suggests a wider platform-economy perimeter. That matters because many regulatory duties now attach to the platform’s governance position: it sets rules, ranks traffic, allocates data access, disciplines merchants, designs consumer flows, and structures labor-like relationships.
For counsel, the core question is no longer only “is this entity an e-commerce platform operator?” It is also “does this entity exercise platform governance power over another participant’s market access, pricing, traffic, data, or rights protection?“
2. Platform rules move closer to hard-law supervision
DCC has already archived the Measures for the Supervision and Administration of Online Trading Platform Rules, effective February 1, 2026. Those Measures require platform rules to be published, searchable, opened for comment before major changes, retained historically, and paired with appeal channels including human review where AI alone made the decision.
The E-Commerce Law amendment appears to move in the same direction at the statutory level. If adopted, platform service agreements, merchant rules, consumer dispute rules, personal-information rules, IP rules, fee rules and ranking/traffic rules will be harder to treat as ordinary private contracts. They are becoming regulated governance instruments.
3. Data and network security remain embedded in platform governance
The official explanation is not framed as a data-law reform. But the operating surface is data-heavy. Platforms govern personal information, transaction data, merchant operating data, ratings, logistics data, advertising data and algorithmic traffic allocation.
The existing Platform Rules Measures already require platform rules to address information security, personal-information processing, third-party providers’ network-data security obligations, and minors’ online protection. The draft E-Commerce Law amendment should be read with that rulemaking layer: platform data compliance is now partly a question of whether the platform’s own rules allocate data rights and obligations lawfully and fairly.
4. The liability model is becoming more graduated
The official Q&A emphasizes “proportionality between violation and punishment” and a multi-level legal responsibility system. That is a response to a common problem in platform regulation: flat penalties are too blunt for day-to-day governance failures, but business-suspension tools are too heavy for routine compliance defects.
Expect more intermediate tools: interviews, orders to correct, public disclosure, compliance reports, transitional periods for rule changes, targeted restrictions, and more precise allocation of responsibility between platforms and in-platform operators. The exact tools depend on the final text, but the direction is clear.
5. Outbound e-commerce becomes a legal-policy topic
The draft’s outward-facing language is unusual for a domestic platform statute. The regulators speak of aligning rules and standards with international practice, guiding orderly outbound expansion, and adding countermeasure tools.
For Chinese platforms and overseas counterparties, that signals a two-sided compliance agenda:
- outbound Chinese platforms will need stronger internal governance for foreign market entry, foreign consumer protection, foreign data rules and cross-border dispute handling; and
- foreign trade or regulatory actions affecting Chinese e-commerce enterprises may be met through domestic legal countermeasures once the final law supplies the tool.
Operational checklist
For platform operators or investors with China exposure, the draft points to six workstreams worth starting before the final text:
- map all participant roles, including platforms, in-platform operators, third-party service providers, workers, consumers and other platform-economy participants;
- inventory platform rules and identify which ones affect important rights or market access;
- test the rule-change process: public notice, comment solicitation, transition period, historical retention and appeals;
- review fee, traffic, ranking, restriction and penalty rules for fairness and proportionality;
- align personal-information, network-data security and minors-protection clauses across platform rules, privacy policies and merchant agreements; and
- for outbound business, document the governance path for overseas legal compliance, dispute handling and regulatory escalation.
The draft is still a consultation text, so clause numbers and tools may move. The direction is stable enough to log: China’s e-commerce platform law is being pulled into the broader platform-economy governance project.
- SAMR / MOFCOM, public-consultation notice on the Draft Amendment to the E-Commerce Law, July 4, 2026; reposted by 电子商务法研究. WeChat source.
- Public notice and attachment links as carried by The Paper. Source.
- Xinhua Q&A with SAMR and MOFCOM department officials, as carried by The Beijing News. Source.
Not legal advice. This brief is DCC’s structural reading of a public-comment draft and official explanatory materials; the final statutory text may differ.