How We Monitor Grey Market Activity

Grey market products can sabotage your brand by reducing pricing power, sabotaging sales, and disappointing customers who expect after-sale care. Unauthorized sellers get a free ride on your brand’s marketing and compete against legitimate dealers. 

How does the grey market arise? Manufacturers can feed the grey market in an effort to move more products. Distribution partners can take advantage of volume pricing discounts and then sell excess stock to unauthorized retailers. Authorized dealers can dump products on the grey market to make room for new items and keep up with quotas. It all works against your brand’s reputation at the end of the day. 

If shoppers can get genuine products at a steep discount, then they do not always understand why to buy from authorized dealers. That saps sales from legitimate sources can create unrest in your network of retailers.

Of course, grey market products don’t come with after-sale service or manufacturer warranties either, which can also lead to more problems. You may start to receive multiple customer warranty calls for products that aren’t covered. Customers are turned away and disappointed. They don’t understand why a brand new product wouldn’t be covered under warranty, and your reputation suffers. 

With BrandShield, you can monitor sellers on marketplaces and social media outlets 24/7 to gain control over unauthorized sales. Having accurate information about the flow of grey market goods can help you decide if you need to rethink pricing strategies, modify distributor relationships, or pursue enforcement against offenders. When you control the grey market, you can recover lost sales and safeguard your reputation.

Common Use Cases:

  • Grey Market
  • Unauthorized Sales
  • Parallel Import
  • Distributor/Price Monitoring

Common Platforms Used:

  • Marketplaces
  • Websites
  • Social Media

CASE STUDY\HOLIDAY SEASON ONLINE BRAND ABUSE

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Did You Know?

75%

Of all sellers are unauthorized for the average brand.

90%

Of leading technology OEMs encounter their products on the grey market

40%

Typical grey market discount on luxury watches

Be in Control

Gain full control on your online grey market status  and to understand the impact on your brand.

Reports & Statistics

Periodic and other detailed reports with monitoring, detection and enforcement activities.

Enforcement Experts

Experienced and knowledgeable enforcement managers analyze your company threats to determine efficient course of action.

Logo Recognition

Cutting edge image recognition technology developed by BrandShield locates logos to uncover grey market sellers.

Social Media Protection

Monitor major social media platforms to detect grey market sellers.

Marketplace Monitoring

BrandShield monitors hundreds of marketplaces to efficiently detect unauthorized sellers.

Some of the companies that work with us


After looking for solutions to our time-consuming research issue with trademark infringements and after having tried various products with external handling and evaluation – which we found unsuitable for our needs – we finally discovered Brandshield. The comprehensive tool allows us to evaluate and act on the infringements fast ourselves, whilst we save a lot of time on the research as it sums all results up in an easy to understand and effective user interface. With Brandshield we are able to optimize our resources and reaction time and are able to easily identify and process far more trademark infringements than ever before.”

Hannes Tribelnig

Licensing/Trademark Protection & Product Placement Manager