Proxies for brand protection
Infringing listings are frequently hidden from the market where the brand’s legal team is sitting, and shown only where they are being sold.
The problem
Counterfeit and grey-market sellers commonly geo-restrict their listings, showing them in target markets while hiding them from the brand’s home country.
Checked from head office, the marketplace looks clean. Checked from the market where the goods are being sold, the listings are there.
The same applies to cloned storefronts and paid ads that only run in specific geographies.
What we would configure
- Proxy type
- Residential — marketplaces filter datacenter traffic heavily
- Rotation
- Per request for discovery; sticky when working through a seller’s catalogue
- Targeting
- Every market where your goods are sold, not only your home market
- Cadence
- Regular sweeps — listings appear and disappear quickly
Coverage is the whole job. A single-country sweep is the most common way brand monitoring misses the infringement it was set up to find.
A real connection
Built from the same parameter grammar the network accepts — copy it and change the country.
user-USERNAME-type-residential-country-pl-rotation--1Run the same sweep across every market you sell into. Coverage is what finds infringement — a single-country sweep is how brand monitoring misses it.
What goes wrong
- Monitoring only the brand’s home market
- Rotating mid-catalogue, which drops pagination on a seller’s listing set
- Sweeping so infrequently that transient listings appear and vanish between checks
- Storing more personal data about sellers than your lawful basis actually covers
Questions
- Why can I not see the counterfeit listing?
- Because it is very likely hidden from you deliberately. Sellers geo-restrict listings to their target markets and exclude the brand’s home country, so the marketplace looks clean from head office.
- How often should I sweep?
- Often enough to catch listings that appear and disappear within days. A monthly sweep will miss most transient infringement.
- Can I keep records of the sellers I find?
- Within the limits of your lawful basis. Evidence of an infringing listing is one thing; building a profile of a private individual is another, and our privacy policy and your obligations both apply.