It is always recognisable, and it is always worse than a lookalike. Your product, your photographs, your packaging, your product description translated with the same mistakes you made, at a price you could not match. Sometimes it is a copy made from your own moulds. The instinct is to write to the platform immediately, in anger, with a screenshot. That message is usually refused, not because the platform is indifferent but because the first thing it asks for is the one thing most exporters do not have.
What you must already hold before you can report anything
A registered right, in the territory concerned. A European or national trade mark on the name and the logo, a registered design on the appearance, sometimes a patent. The rights-owner channels of the large marketplaces are built around a registration: they ask for the register, the number, the goods it covers and proof that the holder is you, and a pending application is often not accepted. There is one right you hold without filing anything — copyright in your own photographs and product text, which is why a seller using your images can sometimes be stopped even when the brand is not registered. That is a narrow lever, and it removes a picture rather than a product. Which is the practical point: the filing is not a legal formality, it is the first anti-counterfeiting measure, and everything in this article depends on having done it before you needed it.
The routes, and what each one actually achieves
- The platform's rights-owner programme. An account verified against your registration, a form per listing, a decision in the platform's own time. It is the fastest route and the narrowest: it removes pages, it tells you nothing about the seller, and it works only on that platform.
- A reasoned notice. European law obliges hosting platforms to provide a channel for receiving notices and to act on those that are sufficiently precise and substantiated. A vague complaint is refused; a notice that names the right, the registration, the exact listing and the reason it infringes gets acted on, and the platform has to tell you what it decided. This is the route that exists even where there is no rights-owner programme.
- A formal demand to the seller. Possible as soon as the platform's trader information gives you a name and an address. It stops the careless reseller, who often did not know, and it creates the dated record a court will read later. It does nothing to a professional counterfeiter, and sending it tells them you exist.
- An application to customs. A right holder can ask the customs authorities to watch for goods infringing a registered right, so that suspect consignments are detained at the border instead of arriving. This is the route that reaches the stock rather than the page, and it is the one most often forgotten by companies that think of counterfeiting as an internet problem.
- Court. An injunction, a seizure, an order requiring the platform or the logistics provider to disclose what it knows about the seller and the volumes. Slow, expensive, and the only route that reaches the money, the stock and the identity at once. It is for the case that is worth it, not for the first copy you find.
Why removing a listing does not remove the seller
A listing costs almost nothing to create, an account costs almost nothing to open, and your photographs are already on their disk. Take a page down and the same stock reappears under a different store name, sometimes the same day, sometimes with your own notice used as a checklist of what to avoid next time: the brand name removed from the title, the logo blurred out of the images, the description reworded. Counting removals is therefore counting your own effort rather than any result, and a company that measures itself that way can report a successful year while the copies sell more than ever.
The goods, on the other hand, have to exist. They are manufactured somewhere, shipped, cleared, stored in a warehouse, picked by a logistics provider, paid through an account and delivered by a carrier. Each of those is a point with a name and an address, and each one is slower to replace than a web page. A customs application stops the import before it becomes stock. An action aimed at the warehouse reaches the pallets. A disclosure order against the platform or the payment provider reaches the identity and the proceeds, and that is what makes a seller stop rather than rebrand. The useful question when you find a copy is therefore not « how do I get this page removed » but « where is the stock, and who is being paid ».
The new handle: platforms have to know who their traders are
European law now obliges online marketplaces to collect and verify identifying information about their professional sellers — the business name, the address, contact details, identification and payment account — to make part of it visible to buyers, and to stop traders who will not provide it. For a rights holder this changes the arithmetic of enforcement. The seller behind a store name is less anonymous, a formal demand has somewhere to go, a court action has a defendant you can name, and a platform that waved the question away has an obligation to answer it. Practice is uneven and the information you get is sometimes thin, so treat it as a lever to pull rather than a database to browse: ask the platform, in writing, for the trader information it is required to hold, and keep the reply.
What to do the day you find the copy
- Preserve the evidence before you report anything. Full page captures with the date visible, the seller's details, the price, the stated shipping origin, and if the matter looks serious a test purchase kept sealed with its invoice, its packaging and its shipping label.
- Check your own titles. Which registered right covers exactly this, for these goods, in this country. If the honest answer is none, the first action is not a report — it is a filing, and everything else waits on it.
- Enrol in the platform's rights-owner programme with that registration, then report listing by listing, naming the right and the reason. A precise notice is processed; a general complaint about counterfeits is not.
- Ask for the trader information and identify the seller, then send a dated formal demand if the seller looks like a reseller rather than the source.
- Lodge the customs application if the goods cross a border, so that the next consignment is a customs matter rather than a listing matter.
- Only then decide whether a court action is proportionate, and against whom: the seller, the warehouse that holds the stock, or the platform that can be ordered to disclose and to stop.
Set this up as a routine rather than as a reaction. One person owns the subject, with the registration numbers and the rights-owner accounts in one place, a standing search on your own product names and images, and a folder where every capture, notice and reply is filed by date. Judge the routine on whether the sellers stop and the consignments stop arriving, not on how many pages came down — and when a seller keeps coming back, move the question from the listing to the stock, the warehouse and the payment, because that is where somebody has something to lose.