Is it true to ban e-cigarettes? E-cigarettes are the favorite of many people who want to quit smoking, so why do wechat ban e-cigarettes? Wechat said in response to every reporter's interview that the above-mentioned e-cigarettes are suspected of engaging in tobacco products sales services such as e-cigarettes, and are suspected of violating the "wechat small program platform operation specifications", and the platform will take them off the shelves.
In the past six months, among the e-cigarette start-ups that have been popular with capital, except for a small number of players who have begun to lay offline channels, most e-cigarette brands are mainly online sales channels, and the main channels are not only tmall, Jingdong and other e-commerce platforms, but also from wechat programs. However, I don't know how long this situation can last.
On May 8, the reporter of "daily economic news" noticed that the e-cigarette retail apps including relx Yueke mall, flow ferro, yooz store, etc. had been suspended. According to the applet page, the above applets suspend service because the content belongs to the service scope of the platform.
In response, wechat said in response to the reporter's interview that the above-mentioned small programs were suspected of engaging in e-cigarettes and other tobacco products sales services, and were suspected of violating the "wechat small program platform operation specifications", and the platform removed them from the shelves. At the same time, the reporter also learned from relevant people that when wechat platform treats suspected illegal small programs, it will check according to specific cases and then deal with them accordingly.
In fact, this is not the first time that wechat apps have standardized the e-cigarette industry. In mid April, the app mall of moti was suspended for the same reason, but the latter has been re launched after the rectification. According to the reporter's understanding, moti changed to a small program tool in the rectification process. However, as far as the small programs blocked this time are concerned, there are also many brands that have used the like small programs.
Electronic cigarette industry practitioners once told reporters that most of the current online brands of electronic cigarette brands are WeChat's shopping mall official account and small program. From this point of view, if wechat apps really want to completely block e-cigarettes, it will undoubtedly be like a slap in the head for the entrepreneurial players of e-cigarette track.
Will the upsurge of e-cigarette business come to an end?
Wechat app 'quarantine' e-cigarette?
While the policies and regulations are not clear, e-cigarette enterprises have been thrown cold water. On the one hand, the more serious problem for operators is the blocking of online channels.
After the e-cigarette was exposed in this year's' 3 & middot; 15 'party, tmall, Jingdong and Suning once blocked e-cigarette keywords. Since then, although the first two platforms have resumed e-cigarette search, Suning has not re launched e-cigarette products.
More than that, on April 15, Beijing CDC released the "monitoring results of China's Internet tobacco marketing data in 2018", which showed that microblog and other Internet platforms with a large number of young users and relatively lack of supervision have become the hardest hit areas of tobacco marketing. In particular, many tobacco articles appeared in some apps originally used for lifestyle sharing and grass planting. After that, the women's "grass planting" community red book comprehensively cleaned up the contents related to e-cigarettes. At the same time, in an interview with the media, xiaohongshu said, "xiaohongshu opposes the spread of tobacco in any form. In checking all relevant information, xiaohongshu has offline all notes about tobacco. '
In fact, whether it's the shielding of e-commerce platform or the content cleaning of little red book, it may not hurt e-cigarette start-ups. The official account of shopping daily told the daily economic news that for many of the e-commerce brand, the main sales channel is the brand WeChat shopping mall and the mall shopping mall. Because of this, the wechat small program suspected of e-cigarette 'knife' just let the industry panic.
The reporter of "daily economic news" noticed by searching a number of e-cigarette applets that among the more well-known e-cigarette start-up brands, relx Yueke mall, flow Ferro and yooz stores have suspended their services; moti Magic Flute app mall, which was removed from shelves in mid April this year, can still open normally after undergoing rectification and renewal; Previously, it was said that the e-cigarette brand "Ono" under the preparation of hammer technology CEO Luo Yonghao, and its small program mall "vvild Ono mall" can also be opened normally.
As for whether wechat app should comprehensively clean up the content related to e-cigarette, wechat told every reporter that according to the relevant national laws and regulations, e-cigarette bombs will be defined as' tobacco products', which can not be spread, promoted and sold through the Internet. Wechat app should abide by the laws and regulations and operate legally. After verification, "moti mall", "relx Yueke mall" and "flow Froude" were suspected of engaging in e-cigarette and other tobacco products sales services, and were suspected of violating the "wechat small program platform operation specification", so the platform removed them from the shelves.
The classification is not clear and the supervision needs to be speeded up
Publishing tobacco advertisements through the Internet is really not allowed by laws and regulations. According to the Interim Measures for the administration of Internet advertising, it is prohibited to publish tobacco advertisements on the Internet. However, some people in the industry said that in the current legal norms, it is not clear that e-cigarettes (mainly refers to smoke oil atomization products, excluding heating and non combustion products) belong to tobacco products, which is why major e-commerce companies will continue to sell.
The reporter of the daily economic news inquired about the Chinese standard classification number (CCS) and noticed that the code of tobacco products in the classification number is B35, and tobacco processing and products belong to the code x85 / 89. Among them, tobacco products mainly refer to cigarettes, cigars, pipe cigarettes, hookahs, snuffs, cigarette bricks, cigarette cakes and other products, and there is no clear mention of the electronic cigarettes of tobacco oil atomization.
However, it should be noted that the reporter inquired the national standard information public service platform and learned that the two national standard plans "20171624-q-456 e-cigarette" and "20172264-t-456 determination of nicotine, propylene glycol and glycerol in e-cigarette liquid by gas chromatography" under the jurisdiction of the National Tobacco Standardization Technical Committee were issued on October 11, 2017 and December 15, 2017, respectively, and are now under approval Quasi stage. In the above two national standard plans, e-cigarette and e-cigarette liquid belong to the category of x87 code in the Chinese standard classification number. This also means that once the above two national standard plans are approved and released, e-cigarettes will be clearly classified as tobacco products for supervision.
According to the protocol of the people's Republic of China's accession to the WTO and the WHO Framework Convention on tobacco control, e-cigarettes should be regulated as tobacco products. However, the electronic cigarette holder, atomizer, battery and other devices that do not contain tobacco monopoly products are not tobacco monopoly products.
As we said in this year's' 3 & middot; 15 'party, at present, compared with the attitude of foreign countries to manage e-cigarettes as tobacco products or pharmaceutical products, most domestic manufacturers, under the banner of technology companies, sell e-cigarettes as electronic products, lacking effective supervision.
And just as guangming.com said in its editorial article, under the premise of e-cigarettes growing like weeds, CCTV 315 evening is undoubtedly a wake-up call. With unclear standards and lagging supervision, it is likely to lead to a lot of chaos that is especially harmful. Therefore, the addiction and harmfulness of e-cigarettes, whether they should be included in the category of no smoking, and how to set the market access threshold and sales threshold need to be studied systematically. In short, for e-cigarettes, a new thing and industry, systematic supervision should be carried out as soon as possible.