When your product is copied

This page is about the moment you find your design on a marketplace at a fifth of the price. It is written for a small brand with no legal department, and it is honest about the ceiling, which is lower than anybody selling you a solution will tell you.

Nothing here is legal advice. Where it says "talk to a lawyer", that is because the answer genuinely depends on where you and they are.

Work out which problem you have

Three different things get called counterfeiting and they need different responses.

A copy. Somebody has made a similar product. Same silhouette, same idea, no claim to be you. Usually legal, infuriating, and mostly not fixable. Design rights are narrow and shapes are hard to protect.

A counterfeit. Somebody is selling a product carrying your name, your logo or your branding. This is trade mark infringement and it is the one where the existing machinery actually works.

A misrepresented resale. A genuine item described dishonestly: the wrong model, wrong condition, wrong edition number, or an item that was stolen. Common in resale markets and almost entirely absent from conversations about counterfeiting, despite being the version most buyers actually meet.

The rest of this page assumes the second or third, because the first mostly is not solvable and pretending otherwise wastes your money.

What works, roughly in order

1. Register the trade mark

Unglamorous and by a distance the highest-leverage thing on this list. Almost every takedown route, marketplace programme and customs seizure asks for a registration number as the first field on the form. Without one you are asking for a favour; with one you are making a claim.

It costs money and takes months, which is why people put it off, and it is the reason the rest of this list works at all.

2. Use the marketplace programmes

Amazon Brand Registry, eBay VeRO, Etsy's reporting, Shopify's DMCA process, Meta's Brand Rights Protection. They are free, they mostly work, and they are built around a trade mark registration.

Report specifically and keep records: URLs, screenshots, dates, and what you sent. Volume is the whole game here. One report is an incident; a consistent stream from a brand that reports accurately gets handled faster.

3. Make your genuine items individually identifiable

Which is the part this site is about, so read the next section with that in mind.

4. Make the buying path unambiguous

A large share of "I bought a fake" is really "I did not know where to buy the real one". A stockist list on your own site, and consistent language about where you sell, converts a proportion of that traffic straight back to you. It is the cheapest item on this list.

5. Talk to a lawyer about the persistent ones

For a repeat seller with a real business behind them, a solicitor's letter costs less than you expect and stops more than you expect. Reserve it for the ones that matter; it is not a strategy for a hundred marketplace listings.

Where an item register helps, precisely

This needs stating carefully, because the industry around it is not careful.

What it does. It makes one specific kind of fake immediately obvious: the one carrying a copied identifier. A forger who photographs a genuine card and prints that code onto five hundred counterfeits has made five hundred items that all resolve to a single, specific object. Scan one and it returns a black tote made in March, number 7 of 10. The buyer is holding a brown one. That is the answer, and it arrived without anybody having to judge the stitching.

Why identity beats a verdict. A system that answers yes or no is defeated by exactly the attack above: every one of those five hundred fakes passes, because the code is real. Returning the object's identity means the forger has to obtain a different genuine code for each fake and match each one to an object that looks like what it describes. That is a much harder job, and it is the entire design argument behind Provenance.

What it does not do. Four things, and it is worth being blunt.

Nothing about a fake with no card at all. Most counterfeits do not bother. The register can say a code is not in it; it cannot say anything about an object nobody scanned.
Nothing about a buyer who does not check. The mechanism requires somebody to point a phone at a card. Most people, most of the time, will not.
Nothing about the copy that is not pretending to be you. A similar bag with a different name on it is untouched by any of this.
It does not prove the genuine one is genuine. A resolving code means the identifier is in your register. It does not mean the object in front of somebody is the object described, and any product claiming otherwise is overselling. There is more on that in certificates of authenticity.

The honest summary: it is a good tool for the resale market and for a customer who wants to check, a partial tool against copied-code fakes, and no tool at all against the bulk of the counterfeit trade.

Things that sound like they work and do not

A hologram or a security sticker. Bought from a supplier who sells to anybody, including the person counterfeiting you. It raises the cost of a convincing fake by a few cents.

A printed certificate. Photocopied. See the guide.

A serial number that is not checkable. If nobody can look it up, it is a decoration that tells a forger exactly what format to print.

A structured serial number. TOTE-BLK-0042 hands anybody holding two cards your production volume, your colourway split and your numbering scheme. Now they know what a plausible fake code looks like.

Blockchain. It solves the problem of trusting a central register, which is not the problem you have: your customers already trust you, and you are the central register. It does nothing about whether the physical object matches the record, which is the actual gap, and it adds a dependency your customers have to understand.

What to do this week if it has just happened

Screenshot everything. Listings, seller names, prices, dates. Do it now, because listings vanish.
Buy one, if you can afford to. A physical counterfeit in your hand is evidence, and it tells you how good they are, which tells you what to change.
File the marketplace reports. Today, and again next week.
Check your trade mark position. If you have not registered, start.
Tell your customers plainly. A short, unhysterical note about where to buy from you and what your packaging looks like does more than the tone of it suggests. Do not describe your security features in detail while you are at it, because you are also telling the forger what to copy.
Then, and only then, think about item-level records. They are a good long-term move and they will do nothing about the listing you found this morning.