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Last updated on: July 11, 2022
Bonanza is an online marketplace headquartered in Seattle, Washington, which allows its users to sell just about everything from electronics to clothes and even antiques. Claimed as the alternative to eBay, Bonanza is a seller-centric marketplace that focuses on unique items instead of pitching sellers against each other for the same item.
But with so many sellers on the marketplace and no real way to vet them, you may also find your brand’s counterfeit products being sold there.
In this article, we discuss:
Bonanza has low seller fees because its goal is to get more sellers and products on the platform. Bonanza charges just $25 per month to host your web store, but there are no other fees involved – no monthly fees, no listing fees, and no selling fees.
The low fees also lead to a low barrier for any seller just to start listing on the marketplace. Bonanza does not vet the sellers or ask for any kind of documentation to verify whether the products they are selling are genuine or not.
The marketplace also does not readily review the product listings to verify their genuineness. It’s up to the customers and brands to report any counterfeits they find.
The longer counterfeit product listings stay active, the more they can affect your brand’s reputation and consumer confidence as well, all of which combined can eat through the bottom line of your business.
Copyright infringement: This involves stealing someone else’s copyrighted content without permission. Since Bonanza also offers books, piracy of books, especially e-textbooks, has become far too common on the platform. As a result, Bonanza completely banned the sale of educational books. But when it comes to other types of books, customers and brands are still expected to report infringements on their own.
Trademark infringement: This involves stealing a brand’s trademarked name, logo, or product labels in order to sell counterfeit products. In some cases, bad actors copy original product images from the brand’s website to make their product listing look authentic. The goal is to confuse customers into thinking they are buying the original product.
Patent infringement: This includes stealing someone else’s patent rights to sell products that look similar or almost identical to an already patented product design.
Bonanza allows sellers to import their product listings and feedback directly from several platforms including eBay, Amazon, Shopify, and Etsy. This sounds great in principle as it can help sellers set up their online webstore in no time, without having to upload product details manually.
But importing feedback and product listings from other platforms actually makes it easier for scammers to quickly set up their store and make it look as genuine as possible – with minimal effort. Scammers don’t even have to spend time creating fake reviews on the Bonanza platform since they can easily import it from another platform.
Importing data also means that even if a seller gets reported and taken down on another platform, their fake product listings and feedback will remain on Bonanza.
Bonanza readily allows sellers to sell antique and vintage items on the platform. This means you won’t always find professionally taken product pictures or long product descriptions for every listing.
But this also means that it becomes easier for scammers to get away with selling fake products by just stating the products are old or vintage. With dimly lit amateur pictures, there is no way of verifying whether the products are genuine or not, just based on the images.
Before you can verify that a scammer is trying to sell counterfeits of your brand, they would have already sold it to several unsuspecting customers.
To report a counterfeit or any other violation on Bonanza, you need an active Bonanza account. There is no separate form that you can fill out directly without signing up on the platform.
After you have logged in on the Bonanza platform, here is how you can report counterfeit product listings:
1- Open the product listing that you want to report and scroll down to the Listing details option
2- Click on the ‘Report Violation button
3- In the type of violation, choose ‘Fake/Inauthentic’ option from the drop down
4- You can provide more details about how the product listing is a counterfeit in the ‘Additional information’ section
5- Click on Submit violation
The report will then be shared with the Bonanza team and they will probably get back to you with an update in a week.
Counterfeits of your products circulating in online marketplaces can reduce consumer confidence in your brand and severely affect your brand value. Instead of manually searching for counterfeit product listings online every day, you can use a software like Red Points to automatically track and takedown counterfeit listings.
See how you can protect your brand on marketplaces with Red Points.
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