E398: How To Defend Yourself Against Copycats and Sabotaged Listings
Sketchy competition is one of the most frustrating stress points for entrepreneurs—more so when you’re running a brand online.
That’s why it’s important to know all the things you can do to protect your brand from copycats and sabotagers.
In this episode, Dave and I will talk all about intellectual property infringement and sabotaged listings, particularly our own experiences and how we dealt with them in the past.
We’ll go over the things you should do when someone copies your products or tries to sabotage your listings. Then, we’ll break down copyrights, trademarks, patents, and all these tools that you can use to build and grow a defensible brand.
Timestamps:
- What actually happens when your product gets copied – 6:09
- The perks of securing design patents – 9:21
- How Amazon deals with infringement cases – 12:11
- Why being sabotaged is tougher to deal with – 15:36
- How I deal with copyright infringement – 25:42
- What a trademark means for your ecommerce brand – 31:48
It’s always a fun time having Dave on for the podcast. If you enjoyed this episode as much as I did, there’s a lot more Mike-and-Dave content over on EcomCrew Premium, which closes in 24 hours!
Aside from unlimited 1-on-1 support from Dave and myself, Premium also gives you access to monthly Secret Sauce webinars delivered by industry experts, a library of 6 full-length video courses in glorious HD, and our private Facebook group where like-minded entrepreneurs exchange strategies to scale their ecommerce brands.
Head over to ecomcrew.com/premium to sign up.
Lastly, if you enjoyed this episode as much as we did, don’t forget to leave us a review over on iTunes. It helps more than you know.
Happy selling and we’ll talk to you soon!
We believe our company was targeted by someone who hijacked a trademark. They registered a brand under brand registry with one of our manufacturers trademarks. We got the notice that they where not selling legitimate product after a test buy. (Of course was fake). Our entire account was suspended for nearly 3 weeks while we dealt with Amazon and the manufacturer of the product trying to wrestle control of their own trademark back from this bad actor. At the end of it they where able to register the brand along with several trademarks that they own on said product. Amazon would not except invoices, packing slips, authorizations to sell letters or anything else to prove we where selling this company’s product. To get reinstated the brand registered us in brand registry as an agent first. Then after several more phone calls to seller support we finally got our case up to another department that reinstated our account. Cost us several hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales over this fake trademark infringement. These are no joke.
Sorry to hear about this Justin :(