Unauthorized sellers on marketplaces are stealing business from a lot of brands by diluting the minimum advertised pricing. unauthorized sellers create a lot of problems for brands. From deteriorated brand equity and supplier relations - there are a ton of problems.
If you're a seller on Amazon or another marketplace, you know how important it is to keep your listings free of unauthorized sellers.
But what do you do if another seller has already copied your listing and is selling the same product under their own name? How do you get them to stop?
This case study will walk you through the process of finding and removing unauthorized sellers from your listings so that you can focus on growing your business and protecting your brand.
The Customer:
Industry: Consumer Electronics
The customer is a US-based brand that approached Datahut to find unauthorized sellers via digital surveillance on Amazon and other marketplaces. They wanted the solution to run in the US and other countries to stop the revenue leakage.
They’re generating over a billion dollars in revenue every year, and unauthorized sellers are causing a lot of revenue leakage.
Challenges:
When the brand began to experience a significant increase in unauthorized sellers across Amazon and other marketplaces, they knew they needed to take action.
Their data was not up-to-date and they were unable to identify the unauthorized sellers. This caused problems for both genuine sellers and customers because it was difficult to differentiate between legitimate products and counterfeit ones.
The brand decided to partner with Datahut to identify and remove unauthorized sellers from Amazon.
The challenges had two parts: proactive identification of unauthorized sellers and enforcement. We were tasked with the identification of unauthorized sellers. Here are some of the challenges we had to encounter:
The brand had more than 200 products sold in many countries across multiple marketplaces via distribution partners.
The unauthorized sellers were acquiring the products from brands' supply chains and other sources, and new sellers were popping up.
Some sellers were selling counterfeit products, causing an increase in negative reviews.
The data delivery from their existing data supplier was not on the schedule.
The unauthorized sellers caused problems for genuine sellers.
The customer was not able to find any solutions that would help them stop revenue leakage by unauthorized sellers on Amazon and other marketplaces. They had tried many tools, but nothing could help them with their problem.
How Datahut helped the customer
The customer realized that they needed help removing these unauthorized sellers from their marketplace, so they reached out to us for assistance. Datahut provided a solution that enabled the client to find unauthorized sellers on Amazon and other marketplaces via digital surveillance. We used our proprietary technology to help them identify these sellers quickly and efficiently so they could take action against them quickly.
We built web scrapers to monitor the brand across all the marketplaces & countries the products were sold. The data was sent automatically to a Mongodb database of the customer every day. The customer team used their custom-built data analytics tool to find unauthorized sellers by comparing it with their own internal databases.
Then the unauthorized seller data is shared with their enforcement team, and they take care of cease and desist notices and other activities.
With our solution, they were able to identify and remove the unauthorized sellers within three months.
Results
Our solution helped them find and remove these unauthorized sellers, resulting in better control over pricing and relationship improvement between the brand and its distributors.
After using our solution, the customer reported several improvements:
1. The customer now has better control of pricing.
2. The relationship between the customer and their distributors improved since there was more transparency between them about which distributors are authorized to sell their products on Amazon and other marketplaces.
3. The influx of negative reviews was reduced because there was less confusion around who could or could not sell their products on certain marketplaces like Amazon or eBay.
4. The enforcement team had better data
Moreover, the brand also witnessed some positive changes like:
Increased visibility into unauthorized seller activity across all channels.
Reduced risk of fraud and brand dilution through consistent monitoring of marketplace activity.
Reduced time spent investigating suspected sellers versus spot checks of individual websites or automated data scraping solutions with limited results.
Increased visibility into IP addresses accessing company websites so that we can identify potential sources of unauthorized product sales online via our own websites (i.e., using our own logos).
Future Plans
The positive results of the data extraction were exciting. They are working with Datahut to develop a solution that will allow them to remove all unauthorized sellers from their marketplace so they can focus on building a healthier community for their customers.