If you run an ecommerce brand long enough, one uncomfortable moment tends to show up sooner or later: a customer sends a link and asks whether a cheaper listing is “yours,” or your team spots a seller using your product photos, branding, or packaging in a way that feels a little too familiar.
That’s usually when the questions start.
Knockoffs can create more than lost sales. They can lead to customer confusion, negative reviews tied to products you didn’t make, marketplace friction, and a growing sense that your brand is being copied faster than your team can document it. U.S. agencies and major platforms have continued to treat counterfeit and infringing goods as a serious issue. U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports ongoing intellectual property seizures at the border, and on a typical day in fiscal year 2024 it seized 55 shipments worth $15 million MSRP tied to intellectual property rights violations, which gives some sense of the scale of the problem in commerce overall (CBP, CBP IPR Statistics). Platforms have also built more formal reporting systems for trademark, counterfeit, and related complaints, but each system works a little differently (Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Shopify).
In this post, you’ll learn the nine questions ecommerce brands ask most often when knockoffs start appearing, what those questions often mean in practical terms, and where an attorney may help bring structure to a fast-moving problem. If you want a broader overview of how these issues fit together across platforms, marketplaces, and copycat accounts, it may help to start with this plain-English guide to protecting your brand across online channels.
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This is usually the first and most important question.
Not every similar product is unlawful. In general terms, ecommerce brands often deal with a few different categories at once: