Abstract
The accelerating expansion of digital commerce and the rising scale of marketplace transactions call for an examination of civil law instruments safeguarding buyer rights under agreements formed on these platforms. The relevance of the topic is strengthened by the circumstance that Ukraine’s existing legislation, including the revised Law of Ukraine “On Consumer Protection” of 10.06.2023, lacks dedicated provisions concerning marketplaces, while Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 (Digital Services Act) has already imposed heightened accountability on online platforms within the European Union. Methods. The methodological toolkit combines both general academic and field-specific legal approaches. In particular, the comparative legal method was applied to juxtapose Ukrainian regulatory provisions with their EU counterparts; the formal-dogmatic method served to scrutinize the norms of the Civil Code of Ukraine and the Law “On Electronic Commerce”; statistical techniques were used to process complaint data gathered by the State Consumer Protection Service over 2022–2024; and systematic analysis tied these elements together. As a results, a steady upward trend in consumer complaints about marketplaces has been identified: nearly 19.7% of all appeals to the State Service for Consumer Protection in 2024 concerned online purchases. A classification of typical consumer rights violations on marketplaces has been proposed. A comparative analysis of buyer protection mechanisms on leading Ukrainian marketplaces (Rozetka, Prom.ua, Kasta) and international platforms (AliExpress) has been conducted. Four main civil law protection mechanisms have been identified: self-defence, administrative protection, judicial protection, and alternative dispute resolution. The necessity of introducing special legal regulation of marketplace activities in Ukraine has been substantiated, taking into account EU experience, including the obligation to verify sellers, ensure ranking transparency, and implement internal dispute resolution mechanisms on platforms.
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