SME Groups Urge Coupang Eats to Issue Compensation for Outage, Warning Livelihoods at Risk

Five small business organizations, including the Korea Federation of Micro Enterprise, have urged Coupang and Coupang Eats to formulate compensation plans following a massive system failure on October 9.

The Korea Federation of Micro Enterprise, the National Merchants Association, the Korea Foodservice Industry Association, the Korea Franchise Association, and the National Cafe Owners Cooperative issued a joint statement today (October 11), stating, "The network outage went beyond a mere inconvenience and directly threatened the livelihoods of small business owners."

They pointed out, "We must not turn a blind eye to the suffering and desperate cries of restaurant workers who rely on late-night delivery sales, as well as online merchants who failed to get proper sales opportunities despite paying expensive promotion and advertising fees."

They urged, "Coupang must transparently calculate the business losses incurred by small business owners due to this service outage and promptly establish practical and comprehensive compensation plans, including advertising fee refunds."

Delivery orders through Coupang Eats were halted due to a system error that lasted for more than two hours starting around midnight on October 9.

The system failure occurred after orders were accepted, leading to incidents where the food preparation completion button could not be pressed, or riders arrived at stores but could not deliver the food because customer addresses were difficult to verify.

Coupang Eats plans to issue 3,000-won coupons to customers whose food orders were canceled, and provide compensation to restaurant owners for orders canceled after placement.
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.