Which Sites Should Your Marketplace Monitoring Strategy Cover?

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Naturally, online brand protection strategies will include Amazon, eBay, and the giant of the East, the Alibaba Group. However, the online retail market also features many small niche players, posing both opportunities and challenges for brand owners. That's why an effective marketplace monitoring and online brand enforcement solution should also include niche and up-and-coming providers.

A vast share of the multi-trillion-dollar online retail market can be attributed to the largest e-marketplaces, such as Amazon, eBay, Mercado Libre, and the Alibaba Group. But, while the market may be dominated by the big players, the impact of niche operators and innovative start-ups should not be overlooked. By including large, niche, and up-coming players in your marketplace monitoring strategy, you cover most of the online retail market, while ensuring that abuse is also detected on the smaller platforms.

As part of our online brand protection solution, we monitor global marketplaces for sellers and shops selling counterfeit goods, false impersonation, copyright, trademark infringement, and non-compliance of distributors. Our specialist team tailors our monitoring service to each client to deliver a transparent and efficient solution for all their specific needs.

From Monitoring to Online Brand Enforcement

A smart mix of technologies, technical knowledge, and subject matter expertise allows us to detect global abuse, reveal patterns, and capture the data and trends necessary for efficient and impactful online brand enforcement [1].

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Tailoring a Strategy for Marketplace Monitoring

Step 1: Detection

As part of the marketplace monitoring module of our online brand protection service, we:

Prioritize a dynamic list of up to 50 online marketplaces that are selected based on relevance and where we can have the biggest impact.
Undertake a quarterly review of 200 + marketplaces to ensure our focus remains where the issues exist.
Filter results and proactively identify infringement, ranging from counterfeit sales to difficult cases of unfair competition, using human intelligence and specialized subject matter expertise [1].

To help clients identify which marketplaces to prioritize, our specialist team conducts an initial screening of each brand across the online marketplaces we monitor to identify the sites where they are most at risk.

Step 2: Investigation & Enforcement

Thomsen Trampedach, our center of excellence for online brand protection, is experienced in monitoring and running online brand enforcement workflows on both large and niche/up-and-coming marketplaces, including those that require the use of local language. Through our dedicated case management and take-down brand protection system, our specialists make use of identifiers, such as company names, contact information, images, and usernames to reveal further cases of infringement. Once the scope of the abuse has been established, our experts will use the same case management system (CMS) to send complaints to the relevant platform using in-built workflows according to each client’s pre-agreed strategy.

One centralized system: We store all relevant data related to the case in the CMS. Each ‘case’ includes a URL, investigation notes, suggested actions, a screenshot, the takedown process, and correspondence between the infringer, the client, and our specialist team.
In-built enforcement workflows: The CMS includes premade enforcement mechanisms for 200+ marketplaces and social media platforms that are tailored and agreed upon in advance with clients.
Proportionate responses: Alongside enforcement activities, we support clients to take an educational approach where bad faith is not evident. This is because many platforms don’t provide the user with the option of filing counter notifications, and the fact that not all internet users have a complete understanding of the law. In these circumstances, you and your legal advisors may find a softer approach more conducive to achieving results.

Frequently Asked Questions About Marketplace Monitoring and Online Brand Enforcement

What Are Online Marketplaces?

At the most fundamental level, an online marketplace is any website providing a platform for independent sellers to market products and services as well as allowing customers to make purchases directly on the same website. This means that online marketplaces are not synonymous with e-commerce in general, the difference being how online marketplaces act as platforms for other sellers.

Why Should I Protect My Brand on Online Marketplaces?

The volume of goods sold on online marketplaces makes them a vital arena for counterfeit prevention and online brand enforcement. Brand protection on online marketplaces has the potential to mitigate loss of revenue from IP infringement, as well as reputational damage thanks to the large number of consumers involved.

How Do I Protect My Brand on Online Marketplaces?

Fundamentally, brand protection on online marketplaces consists of identifying infringements through monitoring and removing those infringements by enforcing your intellectual property (IP) rights.

Many providers provide tools that aim to identify infringements on online marketplaces via algorithms. While automatic detection has an important role to play, such tools tend to require significant input from brand owners to ensure optimization and can produce large numbers of false positives (especially where the infringements are diverse and difficult to detect). We believe that a focused approach based on manually monitoring key marketplaces optimized through periodic screenings is effective and more cost-efficient for all but the largest consumer brands.

Which Online Marketplaces Should I Monitor?

Online marketplaces are highly diverse, ranging from diversified operations (such as Amazon) to specialty marketplaces aimed at promoting a particular type of product (e.g., chemicals) or the exports of a specific country.

Given the number and diversity of online marketplaces, we recommend first performing a far-reaching screening of all the largest marketplaces globally. This allows for an overview of issues affecting the brand in question and for an efficient allocation of monitoring time. Where such a screening is not possible, it is nevertheless vital that the most important marketplaces in key geographical regions are monitored.

In North America and Europe, this would naturally include the Amazon and eBay platforms; in China, the Alibaba platforms and JD; in Latin America, Mercado Libre, and so on.

How Do I Enforce My Rights on Online Marketplaces?

Online brand enforcement is a natural next step after Identifying infringements. Many larger online marketplaces operate intellectual property (IP) platforms that facilitate take-down actions by brand owners, such as the Amazon brand protection program, the Amazon Brand Registry. Other marketplaces require take-downs to be requested by email, and some even require you to use scanned forms. While brand protection platforms greatly facilitate take-downs, recourse to email communication is sometimes made necessary by the fact that the platforms can only be used for a limited number of issue types.

To support brand owners, our online brand protection case management and take-down brand protection system not only centralizes all take-down protocols in a single tool, but also provides clients with easy access to the relevant marketplace monitoring results.

How Can I Enforce My Rights on Chinese Marketplaces, such as Alibaba?

The Alibaba group’s platforms (Alibaba.com, Taobao.com, Tmall, 1688.com, AliExpress, and Lazada) represent the largest cluster of online marketplaces in the world. Given that Alibaba offers access to a centralized IP Protection Platform (IPP) covering all its marketplaces, it is certainly one where all brand owners should be present, whether they manage the process themselves or through a trusted third party.

How Can I Enforce My Rights on JD.com?

JD.com offers a centralized IP rights platform called the JD IPR System. Given that JD.com targets China specifically, you will need Chinese certificates for your trademarks and other registered IP. To use the JD IPR System, you will first need to register an ordinary customer account by clicking on “Create Account” at log in. (New accounts are normally approved within a few days.)

How Can I Enforce My Rights on the Amazon Brand Protection Registry?

Brand owners and agents can report infringing listings on the Amazon marketplaces, using the Amazon brand protection program, the Amazon Brand Registry.

How Can I Enforce My Rights on MercadoLibre?

MercadoLibre has a brand protection program for reporting IP infringements. Unfortunately, the tool is functionally separate for all the many country-specific marketplaces the company operates, meaning that the same process must be repeated on all marketplaces to gain global enforcement ability. To register for the tool, you will need to supply contact information, basic details regarding the rights owner and (for registered IP) a registration certificate covering the relevant country.

Interested in a Free Trial of Our Marketplace Monitoring Solution?

We help dozens of brands with marketplace monitoring and online brand enforcement on global e-marketplaces [1]. Contact us for a demo of our solution or sign up now for a 3-month trial of our online brand protection solution.

[1] Questel does not provide any legal services. Legal services are provided by independent IP attorneys on the basis of a separate engagement agreement between you and, if you wish to, a partner IP attorney firm.