Unauthorized Seller Removal

An authorized seller is any third-party retailer who does not have an official relationship with your company – and has no right to buy your products to resell them to customers – but begins selling and advertising your products.

With the Red Points’ unauthorized seller removal solution, you can take advantage of machine learning and AI to uncover unauthorized sellers of your products online, whether legitimate or not.

Red Points’ unauthorized seller removal solution can act as your digital eyes and ears in that it scans online stores and channels to detect unauthorized sellers. The software gathers data and provides incident evidence, which can be actioned swiftly through automated workflows, allowing brand owners to act almost immediately when there is an infringing listing.

There are three main steps to protecting your brand from unauthorized resellers: identify rogue sellers, monitor pricing, and send cease and desist letters to unauthorized dealers.

Step 1: Identify rogue sellers
You can’t take any action until you know who to go after. Today, an advanced monitoring system can scan marketplaces, seller websites, and gray market websites to look for instances of your brand and products.
A monitoring system can also work to connect the dots between multiple seller accounts find contact information and make enforcement more effective. With information on unauthorized resellers, you can also uncover how they purchased your products to see which of your distributor contracts needs attention.

Step 2: Monitor pricing
In addition to identifying unauthorized resellers, you can use monitoring tools to make sure the dealers in your supply chain are following your MAP policy. This makes distribution contract management easier. With continuous monitoring, you’ll know when a seller goes against your policy. You can act quickly and maintain your pricing power in the market.

Step 3: Notify/send cease and desist to unauthorized dealers
You now have two types of alerts to take action with unauthorized sellers and resellers and authorized sellers that are selling below MAP. The last step is to notify these parties in the right way. You don’t want to send a cease and desist letter to a legitimate seller and possibly harm the relationship, after all. With a legitimate company, you can let them know you’re aware they are selling under MAP and outline the steps you’ll take to enforce that if they don’t comply.
On the other hand, let’s say you found unauthorized sellers who did not sign a MAP policy agreement with you. This is where cease and desist notices come in. Also, if they are selling your products as “New,” you can make a case to Amazon (or another platform) that new products require your warranty, but since the seller is unauthorized, they can’t offer the warranty. This can give you another way to stop unauthorized sellers, remove the listing, and solve the issue.

Unauthorized sellers are a threat to:

Brand
· Being sold through non-official channels
· Shrinking your value
· Diverting revenue

Distribution
· Losing control over sales channels
· Competing with your official partners
· Increasing price race to the bottom

Loyalty
· Offering products without warranty
· Increasing complaints
· Generating negative reviews