Common Contracts

Choice-of-Court Agreements in Electronic Consumer Contracts in China

February 8th, 2021

• Filed
  February 8th, 2021

The past a few decades have witnessed the fast-growing development of electronic commercial transactions. Digital buyers worldwide accounted for 24.3% of the world population in 2015. Now nearly 1.8 billion people are engaged in online shopping.1 E-commerce, by its nature, is cross-border and international. It creates an international virtual market, removing access barriers and costs in traditional commerce. The international nature of e- commerce inevitably raises jurisdictional problems, i.e. since a transaction may have connections with more than one country, which court is competent to decide the dispute if anything goes wrong is in question. E-commerce, unfortunately, challenges traditional jurisdiction rules, which largely depend on geographic connecting factors. One needs to look at the place of contracting, place of performance, the habitual residence/domicile of the parties, etcetera to determine the competent court. Some connecting factors may not always be easy to determine