By Daniel Shapiro, Red Points
The chances are, if you come across a
listing selling a pair of Birkenstocks on Amazon.com, there is a high risk they
are fakes or from an unauthorized seller. Birkenstock is one of many brands to
have pulled their products from the platform in an effort to address growing
concerns over counterfeits.
In a matter of years, the huge
popularity of online shopping has made monitoring e-Commerce sites a key
priority for most brands. As a matter of fact, Amazon recently launched its Project Zero Initiative
in an effort to rid its site of knock-offs. However, with scammers continually
on the lookout for bigger audiences to sell to, the rapid year-on-year growth
of social media users has offered a unique opportunity for them to further
expand their operations.
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Instagram alone now has well over one
billion users worldwide and shows no signs of slowing down — quite the
opposite. As a matter of fact, the photo and video sharing app recently
launched a new checkout feature, allowing brands to sell directly to shoppers
from the platform. Meanwhile, Facebook has also been championing this new e-Commerce-led
approach for quite some time with Facebook Marketplace — a community-oriented
service that aims to bring regular people together to buy and sell on their
platform.
However, whilst these developments offer
new revenue streams for brands, could social media platforms’ move to
direct-to-consumer shopping further exacerbate the platforms’ counterfeit
problem?
According to a study by Ghost Data,
which used logo-recognition technology combined with hashtags and keyword
searches to scan about four million Instagram posts, almost 56,769 accounts
were involved in counterfeiting activities in 2019, compared to 20,882 accounts
in 2016. The current scale of the problem speaks volumes about how
counterfeiters are migrating their sales and marketing operations to social
media.
In recent years, counterfeiters have
quickly recognized the potential of social media platforms for a number of
reasons. To start, the reach available on social is colossal, and as mobile
technology continues to become more accessible, the number of people on social
media will only increase. Additionally, our research has shown that across a
number of different industries consumers already are very receptive to the idea
of purchasing items from social media.
Facebook and Instagram also are renowned
for their sophisticated advertising tools, which explains why counterfeiters
are using these platforms to capture traffic with sponsored posts and redirect
interested parties to other sites to make purchases. On Instagram,
counterfeiters often include contact details for Chinese or international messaging
services, where buyers can follow up to actually make the purchase and bypass
platforms’ security measures. To make matters worse, the hashtags used to
accompany the posts are usually the real brand name.
Meanwhile, despite Instagram’s sophisticated
spam detection and blocking systems, the fact that millions of brands across
thousands of product categories are using the platform daily means automating
IP detection and enforcement processes will become critical for social media
sites to protect shoppers against fraudsters.
Moving forward, with both Facebook and
Instagram now providing transactional functionality on the site and app, brands
will be required to rethink their brand protection strategy so that taking down
adverts on social media is no longer an afterthought and becomes as important
as removing the actual point of sale.
Daniel Shapiro is Director of Brand
Intelligence for Red Points. He brings over 30 years of
entrepreneurial leadership to this role. His keen knowledge in Intellectual
Property comes from his experience in building and leading a Global Brand
Protection team at a major marketplace platform. Shapiro’s customer-centric
background and leadership expertise create the foundation for building long and
prosperous partnerships.
