The Korea Fair Trade Commission has fined the online retailer Coupang 300.9 billion won ($220.59 million) for anticompetitive conduct, the regulator has said.

In its ruling, the antitrust regulator said that Coupang had pressured restaurants listed on its online food and grocery delivery app Coupang Eats to match or beat offers available on rival platforms.

These included preferential offers across menu prices and items, discounts, minimum order amount, delivery fees and business hours, the regulator said.

It added that Coupang revoked WOW designation to those that did not comply. This is a status that allows Coupang-listed restaurants to provide membership discounts to those who pay for Coupang’s WOW subscription service.

In addition to Coupang, the regulator also fined the food delivery company Woowa Brothers Corp 331.1 billion won ($243 million) for comparable activity. Woowa, which owns the Coupang rival service Baemin, said in a statement that it had explained why its actions were legal.

“The FTC has concluded that Baemin and Coupang abused their dominant market positions by imposing unreasonable conditions on partner restaurants that deviated from conventional trade practices, disrupting the business operations of both partner restaurants and competing platforms,” the regulator said.

In a statement to the Yonhap News Agency, the companies both said: “Upon receiving the regulator's final written decision, we will thoroughly review its contents.”

This is the second major penalty that South Korean regulators have imposed on Coupang in 2026.

In June, the country’s Personal Information Protection Commission fined Coupang 625 billion won ($409.30 million) over a 2025 data breach that affected more than 33 million customer accounts.

Data included in the breach included names, addresses and contact details.

The firm, which regulators say failed to disclose the incident within the mandatory 72-hour period required by the country’s cybersecurity laws, admitted that month that 165,000 more customers had been exposed than previously thought.

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