Video 2: Dirty Tricks That Rogue Sellers Use to Devastate Brand Value

The fifth dirty trick we see is flagrantly violating your pricing or branding policies. Often brands see this when they’ve ended a relationship with a particular reseller who still has merchandise inventory and who has now had no incentive to continue following the company guidelines. In this example, the reseller may decide to blow out inventory at deep discounts either online directly consumers or to other resellers or distributors, even if your policies restrict sub distribution. Unfortunately, this can fuel the gray market for your products and push price points below what you’ve allowed in your map or resale pricing policies, creating problems across all of your legitimate channels.

The other bad news is that it can often be difficult to counter this because standard actions such as continuing the reseller status and authorized dealer may no longer be available to you. We recommend that you carefully assess how much inventory this reseller may have, and their sales velocity to assess the size of their potential disruption to your market. Having tools like TrackStreet Amazon Analytics module can provide valuable information forecasting the size of your problem by telling you the actual inventory levels per seller and their sales over a predetermined amount of time. arranging for short term solutions might include buying back inventory or discussing legal options with your attorney. Next dirty trick that rogue resellers use is attempting to boost sales by adding false or misleading information in your practice options. The new practice subscription they may claim to have the latest features, even though they’re offering older inventory, oversell features, hide negative product reviews, or tend to bury those reviews with phony positive reviews or more.

What’s worse, when the reseller is unauthorized and has no real relationship with you or your company, they can damage your brand. Here you’re escaping property views and deliver a substandard experience without much fear of repercussions. The way to avoid this issue is to make sure you set up an authorized dealer program that restricts where approximately sold so that inventory can be kept out of the hands of unscrupulous unauthorized sellers. And to continuously monitor the internet to detect your products, the price points at which they’re being offered, who is selling them the product descriptions.

More importantly, it’s crucial to be monitoring product reviews everywhere your products are sold online, so you know exactly what consumers are saying about your products right next to the buy button, which is one of the modules TrackStreet offers. Sometimes, resellers provide incorrect product information unintentionally, may have been correct at one point in time, but because they managed so many products, and so many of those products have spec changes over time, your updates may have just fallen through the cracks. One way that TrackStreet help customers solve this problem is with our content everywhere module. Just cutting and pasting one line of code their websites, resellers can put what we call the magic box filled with your best content, product descriptions, videos, images, all the information that you provided, which updates automatically when you want it to just a few clicks, you can ensure that all of your authorized dealers offer the best possible product information and brand experience next to the buy button that they maximize the opportunities to convert sales.

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