How Does Alibaba Dispute Work: How to Preserve Evidence During Correspondences

In order to solve your disputes on Alibaba, please save your correspondences in Alibaba’s official chat tool, Alibaba Complaint Center and emails. Such correspondences will later serve as important evidence.

After signing the contract or order, the buyer and the seller will have a lot of correspondence, including supplementing the contract details, changing the contract terms, feeding back the contract performance, raising objections, and negotiating.

You should always save the correspondences with the other party in Alibaba’s official chat tool and your emails.

For more information, you may read 4 Things You Have to Know on How to File a Dispute on Alibaba.

If you complain to Alibaba and submit your dispute to mediation, then you need the content in Alibaba’s official chat tool.

If you resort to court or arbitration for dispute resolution, then you need the content in your emails.

1. Correspondences in Alibaba’s official chat tool.

According to Article 22 of Alibaba.com Transaction Dispute Rules:

The correspondences between the Buyer and the Seller via the Alibaba.com’ official chat tool will serve as the basis for dispute resolution, and correspondence between the parties through other means of communication (including but not limited to offline written contracts, telephone calls, e-mails, and third-party instant chat tools) will not be the basis for the dispute resolution, unless both the Buyer and the Seller agree that such correspondence is authentic and valid.

This means that if you want to resolve your dispute through Alibaba, only the correspondences saved in Alibaba’s official chat tool can be used as evidence.

2. Correspondences in Complaint Center

Alibaba’s dispute resolution platform is Complaint Center.

According to Article 6.1 of the Agreement on Use of Complaint Center:

After the termination of use, Alibaba has no obligation to keep any complaint-related information after the termination of use of the System. Alibaba has the right to delete the information after a reasonable period of time.

This means that even if you are dissatisfied with Alibaba’s complaint handling decision in the future, you may not get the data about the complaint. This may prevent you from resorting to court or arbitration.

3. Emails

If you are dissatisfied with the result of Alibaba’s dispute resolution, you may resort to court or arbitration.

You can sue Alibaba, but you may not rely on Alibaba to save the content in its chat tool or Complaint Center.

In this case, if you have confirmed something in your emails with the counterparty, then these emails are admissible as evidence.

Therefore, you need to confirm with your counterparty by email regularly, so that you can retain some evidence in your hand if needed.

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