The discovery is almost always accidental: a distributor sends a screenshot, or someone in the office searches the brand name out of curiosity and finds a listing. The product in the photograph is yours. The packaging is yours, the batch code is real, and a customer who buys it receives exactly what the brand promises — at a price below the one your own network is allowed to charge. The first instinct is to treat it as counterfeiting, and that instinct sends you down the wrong road for months.
Genuine goods, on a route you did not choose
A counterfeit is a product someone else made and labelled with your name. A parallel import is your product, made by you, bought legitimately somewhere in the world, and resold in a market where you did not intend it to go. The two problems look identical in a marketplace listing and have almost nothing in common underneath. Against a counterfeit you have an infringement, a seizure, a takedown and in principle a court. Against your own goods you have a contract question and a pricing question, because nobody has faked anything.
That is also why your distributor comes to you rather than to the seller. From where they sit, the brand has two prices in their market: theirs, which they committed to defend, and another one they cannot match. They did not create the second price and neither did the grey seller — it was created by a gap somewhere in your own commercial architecture, and the seller merely noticed it. The complaint is uncomfortable because it is substantially correct.
Transfer prices and the gaps between markets
A brand that sells in several countries almost never sells at one price. There are price lists by region, volume brackets, promotional support, end-of-year rebates, currency movements, and clearance terms for a range that is being replaced. Each of those is a sensible decision taken on its own. Together they create positions where the landed cost of a unit bought in one market is below the official wholesale price in another — and where that gap is wider than the cost of a container and a customs declaration, someone will move the goods.
China makes the arithmetic especially visible for two reasons. Prices there are public in a way they are not in a distributive retail network: a platform listing is a number anybody can read, compare and screenshot. And the cross-border channel exists as an ordinary, legal way for individuals and small sellers to bring in foreign goods, which means the route from a cheaper market to a Chinese buyer does not need to be clandestine to be cheap.
| Where the goods come from | How it starts | What it tells you about your own terms |
|---|---|---|
| A distributor in another market | They over-ordered to reach a volume bracket, or they are clearing a range you replaced, and a buyer offers cash for the surplus | Your volume incentives reward an order, not a sale — and your end-of-range terms have no destination clause |
| A travel or duty-free channel | Individual purchases consolidated by someone who buys at retail abroad and resells online at home | Your retail price abroad, minus the tax a traveller does not pay, is below your Chinese retail price |
| Your own factory's overrun | Units built beyond the order — overproduction kept against scrap, or a second shift nobody declared | Nobody counts what leaves the line against what you paid for, and the tooling is not under your control |
| A returns or warranty flow | Units taken back, repacked and sold on as new by a third party who was supposed to destroy them | Your reverse logistics ends with an instruction rather than with a proof of destruction |
The levers that actually move it
- Batch and lot traceability. A code on every unit, recorded against the customer it was shipped to. Without it, a grey listing is an annoyance you can do nothing with; with it, buying one unit and reading the code tells you which account the leak sits on, and that single piece of information changes every conversation that follows.
- Resale conditions written into the contract. Territory of resale, a prohibition on selling to re-exporters, an obligation to pass the same restriction down the chain, and a named consequence. A distribution agreement that says nothing about destination has authorised everything it does not mention.
- The trademark, registered in China, in the right classes. This is the hook that makes a platform complaint possible at all. A platform will not arbitrate your price; it will act on a rights holder's notice. No registration, no notice — and the registration also has to cover the classes the listing actually sits in.
- Platform notices on the grounds that exist. Unauthorised use of your images and copy, a false claim of official status, a warranty or service promise the seller cannot honour, missing Chinese labelling where the product requires it. Each of those is a reason a marketplace recognises. « This seller is cheaper than my distributor » is not.
- Incentives that reward sales rather than orders. Rebates paid on sell-out rather than sell-in, volume brackets that do not jump at a single unit, and end-of-range clearance handled as a buy-back or a destruction rather than as a discount to whoever takes the pallet. Most grey stock was created by a well-meaning commercial condition.
One practical remark on the platform route. A notice naming a precise, verifiable ground against a precise listing tends to be processed; a general complaint about a brand being sold too cheaply does not. And a removed listing reappears under another seller name, which is why the upstream work matters more than the takedown count: the notices keep the most damaging claims off the market, they do not clear the market.
What it is illusory to hope for
You will not eliminate it. A product that is desirable, portable and priced differently in two places will move between them, and the only brands with no grey market are the ones nobody wants. Chasing sellers one by one produces a list of closed listings rather than a change in the market. And the legal avenue is narrower than it feels: the goods are genuine, the sale is a sale, and in most systems a right in a trademark is not a right to set the resale price of something you have already sold.
The achievable objective is narrower and more useful: keep the grey channel small, keep it away from the customers your distributor needs, and make sure it never carries the brand's promises. A buyer who finds a cheaper unit from an obviously unofficial seller, with no warranty and no service, has been told something about the difference between the two offers. A buyer who finds the same unit presented as official, with your photographs and an invented guarantee, has not — and that second case is the one worth your effort.
Before writing to anyone, buy one unit yourself and read its code. Everything useful follows from knowing which account it came off: the conversation you have with that distributor, the clause you add at the next renewal, and whether the problem is a leak you can close or a price structure you have to redesign. Without the code you are negotiating with a screenshot.