Consumer protection laws are basically non-existent in Malaysia so companies face no repercussions for misleading, or downright dishonest, practices.

Those practices are especially predominant in e-commerce startups, particularly ones influenced by a certain European “venture builder”. You’ve definitely heard of it.

Here are some examples.

Zalora

1. It always has “store-wide” discounts that apply to only certain parts of the store.
2. It has inflated the recommended retail price. I don’t understand how brand owners allow this.

Lazada & Shopee

1. It automatically opens Google Play when you open it on Android on the web. It doesn’t even show the results page. I’m curious how they managed to not get penalized by Google’s algorithm for doing this.
2. Everything is on sale, all of the time.
3. As a result of the merger with Alibaba, fakes are not only rampant but low-key encouraged. It’s in their interest to keep them since it gives the impression that they’ve the best deals.
4. They encourage you to use their wallet to pay. That means you load the wallet first, and then use the balance to pay. Which then means that if you want a refund it goes to your wallet, not the payment method you used to reload.

Airasia

1. They unilaterally decided that they’ll just refund credit to their customers.
   1. And then imposed wild restrictions on how it can be used.
2. They sold an “unlimited pass” and imposed several limits on what it can and cannot be used on.

Grab

1. They did the typical shrinkflation move with their loyalty points, several times. They increased, doubled in fact, the cost of everything you can redeem, and then marketed it as a limited-time discount.