How to Put an End to Gray Market Sales?

Online shopping and eCommerce present us with multiple sites like Craigslist, Amazon, eBay and

others where products are sold at high discounts that at times looks “unusual”. Most consumers while

shopping online tends to compare the prices quoted in multiple sites. There is a section of the

audience who gets lured by these discounts and lucrative offers and ends up purchasing the

products, thereby contributing to gray market sales.

What is s Gray Market?

With online shopping gaining prominence, the amount of online scams, frauds and questionable

tactics too are becoming popular. Gray market goods happen to be one of them. Simply put, a gray

market product refers to someone selling new goods through certain distribution channels that are

not approved and authorized by the original manufacturer. This means that the original products are

tweaked to a great degree by the gray marketers in terms of its price and quality.

Gray market goods generally turn out to be a fake duplicated copy of the original brand offering.

Therefore, the quality and durability is sure to go down soon, making the consumers lose their faith

in the original brand. This results in loss of brand reputation, revenue, market share and consumer

goodwill that at times becomes very difficult to retrieve.

Protection from Gray Market Sales

However, the good news is that gray market sales can be put to a halt today. Service providers

specializing in enterprise risk management have come up with online brand protection solutions that

help companies to identify the gray market sales channels. The solution is available in the form of a

SaaS-based software with innovative proprietary search capabilities. This enables the companies to

trace where their products are being sold and at what price range. The moment the software gets

installed, it offers instant monitoring for buying/selling listings for goods, with the help of advanced

search agents that can efficiently track detailed market information from multiple sources. This

includes the following:

● Franchise and huge distribution websites

● B2B sites

● Trade boards

● Independent and gray market web sites

● B2C sites

● Auction sites

The data collected by the software is presented to the end users directly in a multi-dimensional,

compact, market intelligence format through a website. This enables them to set up customized

dashboard, user formatted data export files and custom report views. All the data is available and can

be utilized within an intuitive user interface, enabling the users the capability to create and manage

cases histories, evaluate evidence and understand the association between suspect companies,

partner and other related contacts.

Read More About: brand management, Counterfeiting.