Nearly 90% of so called genuine Apple products sold online are fake. How do you identify counterfeits online using data and save the reputation of your brand?
Apple says it has been buying Apple chargers and cables labeled as genuine on Amazon.com and has found most of them to be counterfeit. Apple filed a lawsuit against a New Jersey company on Monday over what Apple says are counterfeit chargers and cables for its products that were sold on Amazon.
Some sources on the web says the size of online counterfeit market is 1200 Billion. This surely can hurt the brand reputation and cause significant loss in sales.
A good example will be Forearm Forklift. Amazon counterfeits put Forearm Forklift , a company that makes Lifting Straps in the brink of collapse. You can read the full story here – Forearm Forklift.
The trillion dollar question is, How do you find counterfeit sellers online?
It is impossible to find the all counterfeits in big E-commerce websites using manual search.
The reason is that there are millions of products in these sites and they are updated nearly
real-time. But there is a way to get around this problem and that is using data extraction.
Scalable Web data extraction solutions can search through millions of products and help identify reflags that counterfeit products usually have.
Here are some red flags to look out for:
The prices of Counterfeit products changes drastically.
The counterfeit providers can’t sell under the same seller name for too long. They will try to sell
out things faster. The best way to do that is to offer a heavy discount. A data extraction tool can frequently extract the pricing info and look for huge variations. If there is big variation, it is a red flag and the reputation management team needs to perform a background check on the seller to see if he is genuine.
The counterfeits list the product in coupon websites.
The counterfeits will aggressively try to sell out their inventory. The best ways is to list them on coupon sites. People who are trying to save a nickel or two will fall prey for these counterfeits without knowing it is fake. This creates a hatred for the brand. You can imagine how many billions of dollars Apple lost due to these counterfeits.
Counterfeit products tend to have bad reviews.
Counterfeit products will get faulty quite often and those who bought it will give it a poor review.
A powerful data extractor can extract the reviews. The start rating and sentiment score of the extracted reviews can be benchmarked against the reviews of a genuine product. If there is a big variation, it is a red flag and the reputation management team needs to perform a background check on the seller.
Automating the Identification of red flags with the help of data extraction can save a ton of time and money. Do you need help with identifying counterfeits online? We help companies such as yours with data extraction. Get in touch with us today.