How to Protect Your Brand?

Off late there has been a growing concern with eCommerce businesses with an alarming rise in the number of duplicate and fraudulent websites. These websites maliciously scrape the product and brand content of eCommerce websites and create mirror-like sites that are deceptively similar in appearance. By doing so, they create an illusion of legitimacy, either by posing as an imposter or by offering the same products at an unbelievably discounted price. Their sole purpose is to trick unsuspecting customers into completing online orders, leaving them empty-handed. Worse, the credit card information used during these transactions is often exploited for further fraudulent activities.

Most of these fraudulent websites are located overseas, making it arduous for an eCommerce business to take effective action against them and remove them swiftly from the internet. The legal complexities and jurisdictional challenges that arise from dealing with such international entities exacerbate the situation, leaving many vulnerable to continued exploitation.

Some imposters also manage to gain organic rankings in Google search results. This means that when customers search for the legitimate brand of the company on the platform, they are inadvertently presented with these fraudulent websites. This severely damages the brand reputation, causes unnecessary disruption for eCommerce businesses, and increases the likelihood of innocent customers falling prey to these scams.

Here are some proactive measures that make it difficult for duplication and fraud to occur, that you can take to safeguard your brand and customers.

Proactive Measures to Prevent eCommerce Website Duplication and Fraud

• Review overseas traffic as it relates to your business and consider blocking any traffic that is not relevant to your eCommerce business. This will make it more difficult for a fraudster to get your site’s content and data.

• Implement third-party applications on your website that act as barriers to saving the code of your eCommerce website pages, downloading images, and copying content.

• Watch for the signs of someone scraping your eCommerce site for data such as increased session traffic is the first signal, with the second signal being an increase in overseas traffic.

If your eCommerce website has been duplicated, it may be difficult to have the offending website removed. Even if it’s taken down successfully, we have seen others start to show up on new domains. Some recommended actions to take if you believe that your eCommerce site has been duplicated and is acting as a fraudulent site are as follows:

• Contact the web host for the fraudulent site with a takedown request.
• Contact the domain registrar for the fraudulent site with a takedown request.
• Reach out to TRIBBUTE for an assessment of the fraudulent website and a deeper technical review for other actions. 
• In some cases, the need to retain a legal resource may be required.

As always, we love to hear your thoughts, questions, and insights.

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