The city's consumer advocate met with representatives of a major online retailer Thursday to criticize the website's policy of charging a restocking fee for returned products.

The Shanghai Consumer Council asked representatives of yixun.com to justify the 10-percent fee that it charges customers for the opened items they return. "It is unfair for Yixun to collect the restocking fee because it is impossible to check a product without opening it," said Tang Jiansheng, the council's vice secretary.

The council said that it has received about 1,200 complaints about Yixun this year, up 83 percent from the same period last year. The council took issue with Yixun's policy of charging the fee, which doesn't square with a new consumer protection law that requires online retailers to give customers a full refund for the products they return. The law took effect on March 15.

The site's policy requires customers to pay 10 percent of the price of an electronics product that they've opened but not activated. One such customer, Zhang Fengshan, bought a mobile phone for about 1,900 yuan ($305) from Yixun on March 18. He opened the product, but found he could not use it with his SIM card. When he requested a full refund the next day, the website refused.

"Before I bought the item, I did not see anything that mentioned I would have to pay a 10-percent restocking fee," Zhang told the Global Times. "I only found out after a customer service employee told me about it."

Yixun ended up refunding Zhang 90 percent of the price of the phone.

"It is impossible to click through all of the links and read all of the policies before buying something from the website," Zhang said.

A reference to the restocking fee can be found by clicking the after-service link at the bottom of yixun.com, which then links to two more pages.

Zhang also questioned the size of the fee. "It was just simple plastic packaging," he said. "I can't understand why it costs so much for the company to take the product back."

Yixun shoulders the majority of its restocking costs and only asks customers to pay a small portion of them, said Zhang Hong, director of the site's after-sales service department.

"We are willing to negotiate the fee with customers to avoid unreasonable situations, such as when a customer returns a 500-yuan product and another returns a 5,000-yuan product," he told the Global Times.

The council also accused the website of violating the law for only allowing its customers to return products within seven days, as opposed to the seven workdays required by law.

About 35 percent of Yixun's customers complaints are about product returns, said Wang Yuwei, the website's public relations officer. She suggested that many shopping websites have return policies similar to Yixun's.

However, jd.com, another major online retailer, doesn't charge a restocking fee for returned products, even ones that have been opened, a customer service representative said.