Korea sets national standard for secondhand trading platforms

South Korea's industry ministry said Thursday it has established a national standard for secondhand goods trading platforms, issuing service and dispute-handling guidelines for a market that roughly half the population now uses.

The Korean Agency for Technology and Standards, which the ministry oversees, enacted the guidelines as a Korean Industrial Standard on Oct. 28. The standard lays out common procedures for platform operators, which have until now handled transactions between individuals without systematic rules.

The case for standards rests on scale and on the disputes that come with it. Some 23.39 million people used secondhand trading services as of August 2025, and the market was worth about 35 trillion won ($26.4 billion) in 2023. Requests for dispute mediation rose about 6.4-fold over five years, from 906 in 2020 to 5,848 in 2025, while losses from in-person secondhand trading fraud reached about 874 billion won ($660 million) in 2025.

The standard divides a platform's service into six stages: membership registration and seller verification; product listing and management; search, inquiries and negotiation; choice of transaction method, either remote or face-to-face; returns and refunds; and ratings and feedback.

At the registration stage, platforms are asked to distinguish individual sellers from business sellers so that buyers can check a seller's type before dealing. Because the checks differ by method, the standard separates remote and in-person transactions, with steps for tracking delivery and requesting returns or refunds in the first case and for inspecting goods for defects and confirming transaction records at the point of sale in the second. It also sets out a five-stage dispute process covering receipt of a complaint, establishment of the facts, review of responsibility and the substance of the dispute, a recommendation for settlement, and referral to an external mediation body.

"Since secondhand trading is a service widely used in people's daily lives, it is important that all platform operators provide services under common standards so that everyone can use them safely and conveniently," said Kim Kyu-sung, head of the standards agency. He added that the agency will keep identifying and enacting standards that help resolve inconveniences people commonly face.

The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy said the significance of the standard lies in setting out service and dispute procedures in advance for transactions between individuals, an area it said has sat in a regulatory blind spot.