Strategies to Combat Grey Market Sales
Developments in internet technology have made it possible for online shopping and ecommerce to flourish successfully. You have a wide selection of products today to choose from and some of them come with attractive discounts. Though we intuitively wonder about the pricing at first, but the sheer attraction of the product and the discounts offered makes us purchase it on most occasions, especially if they belong to eminent brands. The question is, are these products authentic? Today internet along with online shopping has also given rise to a parallel market or the grey market that sells counterfeited products.
What is a grey market?
The term grey market refers to selling legitimate trademark products via non-authorized channels. In most cases grey market goods reach the retailer through a chain of semi-legal operators. Passing through this chain these products can either have their price increased three fold or can have a highly discounted price, without any measureable change in the product itself.
Grey market sales are likely to have a negative impact on the consumers who are looking for the authentic manufacturer’s warranty. Besides this it also affects revenues and the authentic channels of trade. Goods reach grey market when certain authorized channel releases them to unauthorized dealers who then sell them back at heavy discounts. There are cases when these products are mere older or outdated goods that are no more in use owing to new models in the market. Furthermore, grey market sales also lead to loss of brand reputation for the original brand whose products are being sold in an unauthentic manner.
Solutions to combat Grey Market Sales
Today there are a number of companies that have come up with anti-counterfeiting solutions and online fraud detection methods to help you combat grey market sales. These solutions help you to retrieve most of your lost revenue, brand reputation and market share by tightening the value chains. Furthermore, these software’s enable you to track the distribution networks responsible for bringing in authentic products to the grey market and take necessary steps to stop this activity.
These companies have established an innovative web mining and reporting technology that offers organizations visibility beyond their supply chain. They offer a prioritized actionable data against any type of fraudulent activities. The online fraud detection solution enables companies to stop counterfeits and reduce grey market sales. The solution can monitor a wide range of sources globally that comprises of auctions, B2B sites, and grey market emails and so on. As soon as the fraud is spotted, the suspect data is prioritized and analyzed within the solution and delivered for you to take necessary measures.
Thus in today’s globalized and technologically advanced market, it is important for every business to deploy a comprehensive brand protection strategy to combat unauthorized grey market goods.
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