Video 5: Dirty Tricks That Rogue Sellers Use to Devastate Brand Value

The 11th dirty trick we see rogue sellers use is selling counterfeit goods. counterfeit products presents a lot of problems for brands. every sale of a counterfeit product represents lost revenue that should have gone to you. Consumers are often unaware they’ve purchased a product that’s counterfeit and will blame you for the problems they experience. counterfeiters often ship cheaply made low quality copies that lack important health and safety measures which put your customers in danger. There are a number of steps that brands should take to stop counterfeiters and counterfeits.

The first step is a monitoring platform providing you with total visibility of your internet sales channel. Because finding and tracking your products requires combing through billions and billions of web pages daily does not work that humans should be doing manually. It’s impossible. TrackStreet’s Market Visibility module uses a proprietary web crawler and artificial intelligence to help brands find their products wherever they appear on the internet. Whether that’s on major marketplaces like Amazon or eBay, or Walmart, or on individual e commerce websites, TrackStreet AI can find matching products based upon product names, UPC codes, or even photos and can report back to the brand exactly where the product is being sold for how much and by whom.

On a marketplace like Amazon, we can even tell you exactly how much inventory the sellers carrying right now and how many units they’ve sold, which is priceless information and deciding which sellers to target first, as you begin cleaning up your markets. Once a seller you’re familiar with shows up, we recommend that you determine which of these are authorized sellers have your products and which are potentially unauthorized sellers who might be swapping in counterfeit inventory. One powerful strategy that brands use to help consumers find real products from reputable sources is using a where to buy module that drives consumers to dealers known to be selling authorized products and setting up an authorized dealer badging system.

TrackStreet’s where to buy module can route consumers to online or brick and mortar retailers and increase your sales by sending customers who are ready to buy your products to your best, most convenient authorized dealers. TrackStreet’s authorized dealer badging module puts a trust icon next to your products and an authorized dealer’s website. Next, the Add to Cart button on each web page, verifying that the dealer is authorized to sell your products. This can be a very powerful tool for rewarding your best e-tailers and helping consumers avoid counterfeiters and other rogue resellers.

The 12th trick that can hurt your brand is posting phony negative reviews of other competing online sellers or your products. Studies show that 93% of online shoppers find product reviews to be influential and whether they make a purchase. And due to the nature of online marketplaces. If one seller is rated poorly another, maybe one post the photo review may be the next stop on the buyer’s journey. To combat this need a comprehensive system, like the product review tracking module from TrackStreet that can find out what your customers are saying about your products where it matters most. Right next to the buy button. Everywhere your products are sold across the entire internet. The TrackStreet product review module puts every review of your products from every website and marketplace. They’re sold into an easy-to-use dashboard where you can see key trends and run intuitive reports by keyword star rating product or review location.

Or you can set up automated alerts but you know right away when there’s an issue that you need to address, for example, you can set up an alert that will tell you when you get any review anywhere that’s less than three stars and has words like fake smoke doctor or anything else that’s relevant to your brand fake review Use will often exaggerate claims to make it sound like there are serious defects that are public safety risk, which might cause a marketplace like Amazon to flag and pull the sellers product or we’ll pack tons of keywords into the review in the hope that search algorithms will be more likely to pick it up. If you’re suspicious that the reviewer could be a fake, there are several steps you can take to reply to the comment right away, as quickness of responses is critical, be polite and professional in your tone. Within that response, we also recommend offering your contact information in that response, so that you can help review or resolve their issue. If they’re phony, or if they bought through your resale network, you won’t have a record of them as a customer. So you might want to ask them for a copy of their invoice to confirm that they bought from an authorized dealer and provide a means for others who are considering a purchase to do the same. If the review looks fake, flag it to the site, whether it’s Amazon or Google or somewhere else, and ask them to pull it or at least investigate it. Review tracking is an easy add on that has an immediate impact on your bread production efforts and can help you grow your product sales across all channels.

The 13th trick we see is to copy your product information verbatim and use it on parallel listings that are in fact different, even if doing so is inaccurate. For example, what if you offer a version of your product as a special warranty, but it’s only available for your authorized brick and mortar dealer network. And then you notice an unauthorized dealer who has taken the same text and photos and put it under an Amazon listing. In such a case, their claims about the product they’re offering, as an Amazon seller who is not part of your authorized dealer network can cause a significant amount of marketplace confusion and even worse, customer dissatisfaction with a consumer tries to use their special warranty and they find out it’s just not valid. This is why it’s so important to monitor internet sales channel find all their pot listings online and restrict your dealer network to authorized dealers only. Promote invalidate in all the ways we’ve already described.

If you’re up against rogue sellers, or others who are trying to hurt your brand, don’t give up the fight is your brand and it’s your job to maintain his value, but you don’t need to be battling alone. Contact us to speak with a brand protection expert and learn how we’ve helped hundreds of other brands just like yours, turn the tables and regain the upper hand.

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