The Ministry of Industry and Trade published the Draft E-commerce Law on January 17th, 2025, to solicit comments from agencies, organizations, and individuals. The law appears to distill previous legislative efforts to regulate e-commerce activities in Vietnam.

According to the Draft, Vietnam's e-commerce has been highly appreciated by prestigious market research organizations (ranked 3rd in Southeast Asia in scale in 2024 and 5th in the world in terms of growth rate in 2022).

However, there have been only 02 Decrees (i.e. Decree 52/2013/ND-CP and Decree 85/2021/ND-CP) issued to govern the area, whose effectiveness is lessening in regards to the advent of new technologies, addressing counterfeit goods, lookalikes, intellectual property infringement, prohibited items, and low-quality products promoted on e-commerce platforms the increasing diversity of business entities and models and the growing delicacy of cyber fraud, etc.

Confronting the above challenges, the Draft E-commerce Law, with 40 articles categorized in 8 chapters, presents a number of notable regulations, namely:

(I) Detailed definitions of e-commerce terms, including “e-commerce activities”, “e-commerce applications”, etc.

(ii) Users’ reviews must be made public unless such contents violate any relevant laws.

(iii) Merchants’ verification shall be applied to e-commerce intermediary digital and foreign e-commerce platforms according to current identification laws.

(iv) E-commerce platform owners must deploy a complaint-handling system for users and assure its efficiency through reasonable means.

(v) Foreign e-commerce businesses are not allowed to provide goods and services in Vietnam until the registration procedures are completed.

(vi) Foreign e-commerce businesses will also have to establish representative offices in Vietnam or appoint an authorized representative being a legal person within the territory.

(vii) Foreign goods and services offered shall be subject to domestic standards and import policies.

(viii) Compensation liability of e-commerce platforms.

The Draft E-commerce Law, which is expected to be passed in 2026, shall support verifying merchants’ identities, tracing infringers, preventing tax evasion, and better protecting consumers’ rights, which is supposed to alleviate the prevalence of counterfeit and infringing goods in Vietnam.

Hai Dinh

IP Associate

[email protected]

+84 28 73 009 678