Consumer Protection in E-Commerce: A Legal and Compliance Framework in the Digital Market

The consumer and merchant protection in business to consumers or business to business under E-Commerce has numerous serious threats viz., privacy, infringement of Intellectual Property Rights, Online Piracy, unsolicited commercial electronic advertisements and spamming, free speech and censorship and other fraudulent activities etc.Although the existence of several advantages of E-Commerce like easy access to virtual global market, reduction in distribution costs, time saving, building a healthier relationship with consumers etc, yet the legal and security risk is still a major threat in the digitalized market.Therefore, for proper functioning of E-Commerce, Consumer and merchant security is of prime importance.There are laws governing the purchasing and selling of products within E-Commerce zone.But when it comes to virtual world, such as second life then and there are no laws which a merchant has to abide by.In one way this can be seen as a positive aspect but on the other hand people do have moral, social and ethical responsibilities to the users.Hence an attempt has been made out in this paper to widely discuss about the legal environment and compliance with regard to E-Commerce in the digitalized global market.Also, this paper further describes the longarm statues and jurisdiction aspect relating to the disputes and issues in E-Commerce.