How can small vendors catch copycat sellers? 19 methods shared with you

Many sellers get a headache when talking about follow-selling, because the traffic and results of their hard-earned listings are directly taken away by others, or even worse, their links are plundered. So what are the common forms of follow-selling, and what should you do if you encounter follow-selling?

Common forms of follow-selling

1. Midnight follow-up: In this case, sellers need to pay attention to their shopping cart occupancy rate. If a shopping cart has been snatched away, two will be shown in the historical price of Keepa. However, if the shopping cart is not 100%, it does not necessarily mean that someone is following the sale. Maybe there is something wrong with the listing itself, which leads to a decrease in occupancy rate, so you need to check it yourself.

2. Cross-site follow-selling: This form of follow-selling has become very serious recently. It uses the seller's UPC to upload products on other sites that the seller has not opened, forming cross-site follow-selling. Moreover, due to the locality of brand registration, it is difficult to complain about this kind of follow-selling. Some sellers have encountered cross-site follow-selling sellers who follow their own products and mess around on sites that he has not opened, resulting in the splitting of the site variants he originally sold, a significant drop in order volume, and he failed to add variants manually, and the case was also reviewed. It is recommended that members can pay attention to whether their products are being followed on other sites.

3. 24-hour follow-up sales: This type of follow-up sales is blatant and insane, and it is hard to get rid of it like a dog-skin plaster. These sellers usually have one or more accounts to follow your listings, or they may be machine-operated follow-up sales, which are posted under your listings 24 hours a day. They may be professional follow-up sales. You can click into their store and see a variety of follow-up products, including products from best sellers. If you are followed by such professional follow-up sellers, it is recommended to deal with it as soon as possible. Maybe after you are followed, all the products in your store may be targeted by other follow-up sellers.

Next, I will share a few methods to catch copycat sales, I hope it will be helpful to you.

Method 1: Direct complaint

Applicable to: Sellers who have completed Brand Registration 2.0

Access: https://www.amazon.com/report/infringement

Effect: This type of complaint used to have a pretty good effect, but unfortunately now there are so many complaints like this, and the information provided by sellers is very little. In short, they are telling Amazon: I’ve been copied, I’ve been copied, I’ve been copied; deal with it quickly, deal with it quickly, deal with it quickly.

Therefore, in many cases, it is impossible to drive away the copycats, and most of the time is wasted on haggling with Amazon.

Method 2: Send a warning letter

When an ordinary small seller is copied by others, his first reaction is to send a warning letter. After all, it is better to be polite before using force.

Reference email content:

Hi,

We are xxxx, registered xxx brand, ourlawyer will contact you if you don't remove your listing within 24 hours.

We both know Amazon sellers are not easy, sowe email you first before we take steps to protect our right.

Here are lots of methods that our professional team will do for protecting our rights.

Xxxx brand copyright team

Method 3: Email Amazon Performance Department: [email protected]

The email title should be: Possible fraudulent sellers

Email content:

Seller's name ：

Link of their storefront:

Text: We believe above sellers are engaging infraudulent activity. Please investigate.

No additional description or any other decorative text is needed

Method 4: Test Buy

Sellers who do not have a brand or whose brand is not protected by trademark registration can use this method to prove that the two products are different, open a case with Amazon and request to remove the link of the copycat seller.

Method: Find a reliable buyer or friend to help you buy the products of the copycat seller. If you don’t have a local friend in the United States, you can also find an evaluation agency to help you buy. After the purchase, send you the order information. After the buyer receives the goods, take pictures of the outer packaging and product pictures. If the products are different, the pictures will be different. For example, if the products and outer packaging are exactly the same, pay attention to changing the angle when taking pictures to deliberately create a different visual effect, or make the product look dirty and old. After collecting this information, start complaining to Amazon.

Note: When we write the basic information of the complaint, just write that the products are not the same model and are fakes. Do not write trademark infringement or anything like that. If you write trademark infringement, it will trigger the intervention of more departments, which is not conducive to quickly driving away the copycat sales.

Method 5: Target new stores or stores with few feedback

A. For FBM copycat sales: Find multiple buyers to buy the other party’s products, open an A-Z case or contact Amazon directly to complain about counterfeit goods or open an AZ case and leave a 1-star negative review

B. Follow-selling for FBA: Find buyers to continuously purchase the other party’s products and return them, and contact Amazon to complain about counterfeit goods.

Method 6: Adjust the price very low and clear out the copycat inventory (both FBA and FBM copycats are effective)

Some followers use software to set up an automatic price adjustment function in order to grab shopping carts. If you lower the price a little, it will also lower it a little. In this case, test whether it has set a minimum price. You adjust the price to a loss-making price. If the other party also adjusts the price down, then contact the service provider outside the site, secretly adjust the price to a price that loses a lot of money at night, suspend selling your own links, and notify the service provider to immediately post the celebrity post, which will definitely cause the followers to suffer a huge loss!

Method 7: Post a review-free form in a WeChat or Facebook group (a bad trick)

This trick is a bit damaging. It is to analyze the stores that follow the sellers, find a few high-value products, use your own WeChat or Facebook account to post no-review orders in the evaluation group, and after posting more than a dozen orders, collect the order numbers, and immediately send them to the sellers with your own buyer account, saying that these are test buy orders, and ask them whether they will withdraw. If they don’t, there is no need to notify or refund the buyer, and the sellers’ accounts can directly receive refunds every day! (Note: In order to prevent possible retaliation from the sellers, use an anonymous buyer account and purchase other products from the sellers’ stores, not your own products)

Method 8: Transparency Program

After joining the "Transparency Program", the product will be affixed with a "Transparent Label" (a blue T label), which is a unique code, a bit like the UPC digital code, which is used to be scanned and identified by the Amazon APP (already supports Android and Apple).

After sellers join the Transparency Program, they can get an identifier from Amazon, which is an encrypted 26-digit alphanumeric code that can generate a unique QR code. These QR codes correspond to the seller's SKU, and sellers of follow-selling or counterfeit products cannot forge this QR code, thereby achieving the purpose of preventing follow-selling.

Method 9: Amazon Exclusives

This is a project that Amazon has been working on for 13 years. It was not promoted much later and is considered a semi-finished project. The requirements of the exclusive plan are: an additional 5% commission and no seller is allowed to follow suit.

This has another disadvantage. Your own small account will have no one to follow. If your main account dies, the small account will not be able to follow. The small account will not be able to follow up to make up for the orders and get a few VPs. The main thing is that the 5% commission directly exploits the seller's profits. For many sellers with low profits, it is actually difficult to bear such a commission burden. Overall, it is suitable for sellers with large profit margins.

Method 10: Amazon’s zero plan.

You need to have a brand registration and then apply for Amazon’s Plan Zero.

I think Project Zero is the most powerful weapon Amazon has launched so far against follow-up sales. It basically deletes follow-up sales in seconds.

Method 11: Brand Gating

Brand Gating is Amazon’s control policy against big brand copycats. If your product successfully passes the Brand Gating review, then those who sell brand gated products must not only provide the manufacturer’s invoice and obtain written authorization from the brand, but also require them to pay a fee for each brand. Individual sellers can also apply for Brand Gating, and there is no requirement for sellers to register their brands. This is optional, but having a brand registration is more beneficial for applying for Brand Gating.

Method 12: Buy out the other party’s inventory

Using the buyer's account to buy out the copycat seller's inventory is actually to take advantage of Amazon's payment pending mechanism to make the order pending until the other party's inventory is 0, so that the other party is equivalent to "automatically delisting"

If the follower sets a maximum purchase quantity, it will be more difficult and you will have to place orders multiple times until the inventory is sold out.

Method 13: Email bombing

It is recommended to operate with pending

Send him thousands of emails after pending. Send hundreds or thousands of in-site emails to the other party, and embed some sensitive words in the emails: such as counterfeit, fake product, broken, exploded, fire and other sensitive words. After being captured by Amazon, the general account will be warned at the lightest and blocked at the worst.

Method 14: Follow big brands

The trick is to carefully study the follow-selling store to see if it is selling infringing products or if the text and pictures have big brands. Then use your own buyer account to write an internal letter to the brand as a fan, telling it that someone is infringing on your product and let others deal with it!

Method 15: Affiliate with a brand that has brand registration

Change the brand of your ASIN to a brand registered in another account, and then use the brand registered account to complain to Amazon about copycat sales! This kind of complaint is also very effective!

Method 16: Check him! Contact other sellers of the store whose products are copied

If it is too expensive to get rid of the follower, then it is recommended to check the store information. Use a private buyer account to send messages to other sellers of the follower, and everyone will unite to deal with the follower together. This may be more efficient and cost-effective! (However, some sellers who are followed may not take any measures for fear of retaliation)

Method 17: Patent your product

This should be the most effective way, but the threshold is really high and requires a high level of professionalism. Usually, larger companies have special departments or cooperating lawyers to take care of this issue. Generally, if there is a complaint about a product patent, the effect is very sharp, and it is almost impossible for copycats to counter it. Amazon's policy is also very inclined to protect patents, but not every product can have a patent, and it is not a popular way to catch copycats. If you are a factory or an exclusive supplier, you should make a patent if you have the capital.

Method 18: Contact the investment manager

If you are being copied by others, contact your investment manager and they can help you handle the complaint, but you will not need to verify the actual effect yourself.

Method 19: Paid service providers follow suit

Often it is difficult to get rid of copycats, otherwise there would not be such service providers. Their existence is reasonable. Of course, service providers are not 100% able to get rid of copycats, especially those copycats in the middle of the night. Many service providers are out of reach. You should try to find service providers recommended by friends to avoid being ripped off. Therefore, it is best to register a trademark and file a brand record with Amazon.