Unauthorized sellers are a major obstacle to any business’s success. Part of any business’ success is having goals; we have them, e-commerce marketplaces have them, you have them, and your partners do too. The reality is, in the wild west of e-commerce, your goals can sometimes be hard to meet. Whether you’re a brand or an agency, we’re here to help you not only protect your products but meet your KPIs by proving our ROI.

How do we do that? First and foremost by recognizing that a marketplace’s goals are not often going to align with yours because they are out to meet their own business agenda (for example, Amazon is notorious for encouraging gray market sellers, which inherently cause large losses to your brand’s market share). On the flip side, our goals are directly tied to your success—here’s how:

BRANDS

There are two main areas of focus for most of our brand clients, protecting relationships—either with their retail store partners or authorized online sellers—and meeting sales goals. While these are two separate goals, they work together for maximum business success.

How do we help brands meet these goals?

• Removing Unauthorized Sellers
  
  • Paramount to meeting both sales goals and improved relationships is removing unauthorized sellers who are eroding profit and trust. We do the investigative legwork and continual enforcement to get rid of gray market sellers so that you or your retail partners are retaining the majority of sales—this helps reestablish brand loyalty between you and your retailers and earns more profit for everyone.
    
• Monitoring Buybox
  
  • By reporting on the top sellers in your product’s Buybox, we are able to target the unauthorized sellers of highest importance so that those sales return to your pockets (or your authorized sellers) the quickest.
    
    • It’s important to note that sometimes resellers are truly unaware that they aren’t supposed to be selling your products, and if they are top contenders in the Buybox and moving a lot of your product, there’s potential for turning them into an authorized partner and earning more wholesale sales that way.
      
• Monitoring Pricing
  
  • Price monitoring and enforcement is usually a great second phase of brand protection because it is most effective after removing the majority of unauthorized sellers. If you have not first removed unauthorized sellers, authorized partners often feel that they have no choice but to violate MAP to be able to compete in the marketplace.
    
    However, once you have removed unauthorized sellers, it is a valuable tool to keep track of your authorized partners to ensure they are a good fit and abiding by your brand pricing standards.
    
  • Once gray market sellers are under control and MAP is monitored for e-commerce partners, then these also protect your brick and mortar store partners from feeling like they can’t compete with online sellers and give them the incentive to keep you in their store.
    
  • With everyone on an even playing field, you’ll also be protected from Buybox suppression by Amazon for having cheaper prices elsewhere.

AGENCY

We understand that an agency’s goals err slightly differently from brands themselves. Not only are they beholden to meeting internal brand goals, but also agreement and performance goals to retain business. Often agencies’ great sales or marketing strategies get undermined by the gray market rogues out there who steal Buybox share and leach off of increased sales traffic.

How Do We Help You Reach Goals and Retain Business?

• Removing Unauthorized Sellers
  
  • Your team should be free to do the work that it does best, not wasting time investigating and enforcing on unauthorized sellers. We step in to do this work for you so your genius can really shine on sales and marketing—with unauthorized sellers removed your clients will get to see the full potential and value your company brings to their brand.
    
  • We report not only on the number of unauthorized sellers operating on your products but also on how many we remove—most importantly that we are removing the most detrimental first so you see immediate results.
    
• Monitoring Buybox
  
  • Your clients want to be profitable and when they’re losing money a knee-jerk reaction can sometimes mean they think about cutting you. That’s the last thing anyone wants which is why Buybox monitoring is a valuable tool to have at your disposal. Once gray market sellers are under control you can show the value of your sales and marketing efforts by proving how well your brand performs in the Buybox.
    
  • A second extremely important note on this topic is that, as many of you may know, if your brand isn’t in the Buybox your advertising doesn’t display on the marketplace. As ads are a key feature for most brand marketing strategies, this can be detrimental to any agency’s brand goals. Keeping an eye on this and removing any unauthorized competition is important and protects your KPIs.
    
• Monitoring MAP
  
  • Similar to the note we made above for brands, MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) monitoring and enforcement are our maintenance measures once unauthorized seller numbers are under control.

ACCOUNTABILITY

We believe in total transparency in our brand protection efforts and the alignment of goals with our brand and agency partners. This is why we created our Seller Insight dashboard to display enforcement actions taken and the impact that has on removed sellers, pricing, and Buybox win percentage. This arms you to have all the data at your fingertips to know the health of your e-commerce channels.

We work with our clients to develop realistic project goals and deliverables, and we stand behind those commitments. If we don’t meet the goals we set in our agreement, you get a refund of the percentage we were unsuccessful. We are passionate about driving real results for our clients, and we aren’t afraid to be held accountable to those.

If your team could be performing better on its KPIs with less unauthorized seller competition, we’re at your beck and call.