E-commerce marketplaces and social media are full of counterfeits

 

The vastness of the internet has made it considerably easier to both sell and buy counterfeit products. Illegitimate CPGs are everywhere nowadays. Nonetheless, there are certain places where it is simpler to market these. A study conducted by Red Points showed that 19% of these items were bought from e-commerce marketplaces and 17% on social media.

How to deal with this problem:

This is quite a challenge for retailers since there are hundreds of global marketplaces and thousands of sellers advertising on each. As such, if you do not have the right technology, it would be difficult to keep track of who are legitimate merchants and who are offering counterfeit products.

However, companies are aware of this problem. Indeed, the top e-commerce platforms have been making more efforts to protect intellectual property and brands. Just recently, Amazon spent $700 million on fighting fake products and last year, it blocked more than 10 billion replica listings. Smaller stores are also making more effort to prevent fraud. Pages give sellers and users the option to report fake items, following which, there is a detailed investigation on how to deal with counterfeit products and their sellers. As an e-commerce merchant, a good practice would be to make use of the technology available to identify and report fake goods to the relevant authorities.

Photo Credit: kirstyfield from Pixabay

Amazon is taking steps to prevent counterfeiting