Follow-selling happens every year, but it’s particularly crazy this year!

On the Amazon platform, I believe that most sellers will encounter the problem of being copied by others. Copy selling has a significant impact on product sales. Therefore, sellers basically hate copy selling.

Many Amazon sellers tend to believe that follow-selling is not a business that can be exposed. When following sellers, out of "shame" they often hide temporarily, and then secretly repeat the follow-selling operation at midnight.

In fact, this is not the case. As the follow-selling becomes more rampant, some follow-selling people will blatantly threaten or intimidate the sellers after receiving complaints and follow-selling warnings from the sellers. Now there are even follow-selling people who have begun to recruit apprentices and "train follow-selling people" on self-media platforms!

Unscrupulous follower selling Xiaohongshu to recruit apprentices

Recently, a seller revealed that he accidentally found a blogger who was "recruiting Amazon follow-selling apprentices" on the Xiaohongshu platform. The notes posted on his homepage were all promoting "How to follow-sell" and "How to follow-sell with ERP".

Out of curiosity, Zhaodanmao also searched it and found that the blogger’s profile was "completely rampant": " From no-brand zombie whitelists, TM and R label follow-up sales to FBA follow-up sales, all have some achievements. Constantly studying and researching, and sticking to it to the end!"

Moreover, under the blogger’s pinned note, other “follow-selling” colleagues were found complaining: “Why do you still want to recruit apprentices to make money… Why are you willing to teach others to follow-sell? Isn’t that stealing business…”

According to Zhaodanmao, as cross-border e-commerce becomes more and more well-known to people outside the industry, there are more and more strategies on "teaching newbies how to make money by following sales". Sellers can search on some self-media platforms and find tutorials on topics such as "How to follow sales on Amazon?", "What should I pay attention to when following sales?", "How can I quickly place orders by following sales on Amazon?", etc. There are even companies that are publicly recruiting follow-sales operators.

In addition to Xiaohongshu, Douyin is also full of various live-streamings of follow-selling, "no source of goods", "exchange rate difference", "teaching guaranteed" and so on, using a lot of gimmicks to trick novices into falling for the trap. In fact, these phenomena are becoming more and more common nowadays. Some training institutions that are even more shady, in order to cheat novice sellers' money, sell training courses to follow-selling and promote VC accounts to sellers, disrupting the normal operation of the Amazon market.

As we all know, Amazon allows follow-selling. However, looking at the current situation, Amazon's follow-selling has been completely ruined.

The sellers who were copied said helplessly that the links they had worked hard to build were snatched away by the copycats without any professional ethics. If everyone just made their own products honestly, the business atmosphere of cross-border e-commerce would be improved a lot.

How can we effectively catch up with the sales?

How to prevent copycat sales is the primary concern for cross-border sellers. If you are not careful, you may end up being blocked instead of being able to prevent copycat sales.

In fact, sellers have been falling victim to this situation one after another; according to the account suspension emails sent by Amazon, the follower sellers have engaged in behaviors that harm other sellers, buyers, or Amazon (for example, placing fake orders to limit other sellers’ inventory), which violates Amazon’s policies.

To be honest, this is a stubborn problem on the Amazon platform, and there is no absolutely good solution for now. I can only share some effective methods that some sellers have implemented for everyone to try.

The first method is a tutorial on how sellers use 12315 to catch follow-up sales that Zhaodanmao shared not long ago. You can learn about the specific operations: 12315 report on follow-up sales is successful, and the operation method is recommended to be shared!

The second method: register a trademark and do brand filing.

This can mainly prevent being copied to a certain extent, but it cannot completely eliminate being copied. One thing to note here is: if the seller files a brand complaint, if they are lucky, they can complain away the copycats, but there are also unfortunate situations, that is, the Amazon system misjudges and revokes your brand registration.

So, to some extent, whether or not to file a brand complaint is something you really have to consider carefully.

The third method: Recently, the seller shared how to follow the buyer's account to sell. The general idea is as follows:

① Purchase the follow-up products through a self-created buyer account and send them to a private address abroad. During the purchase process, the follow-up seller is repeatedly asked for detailed product information or invoices, but the follow-up seller often does not respond.

② Contact Amazon's official customer service and complain that the purchased product is a fake and points out that it is significantly different from the genuine product. At the same time, emphasize that you have tried to contact the sellers many times but to no avail, express your strong dissatisfaction with such sellers, and ask the platform to take action. When the customer service offers compensation, insist that you would rather see the fake sellers removed than get compensation.

This method usually takes 24 hours and the seller will be dealt with.

Finally, Zhaodanmao gives you two suggestions for your reference:

1. Sellers can make private models of their main products, make differentiated variants, use old customers to bring in new customers, and achieve a change in track.

2. Stay away from popular categories and turn to unpopular products, which are categories that novices are not capable of and big sellers do not care about. This idea is particularly suitable for sellers with certain operating experience and limited funds.

Although follow-selling is annoying, sellers must remember to protect their rights legally and reasonably, otherwise the loss will outweigh the gain.