How Can You Identify Unauthorised Sellers? A Step-by-Step Guide for Brand Owners

⏱️ Reading time: 9 minutes · 📁 Category: Brand Protection & Digital Compliance

1️⃣ Identifying unauthorised sellers: a step-by-step guide for brand owners

Your products may be sold on Amazon, Trendyol or Hepsiburada—but do you know who actually sells them? Unauthorised sellers can damage the reputation of genuine products, disrupt prices and undermine trust. Brands should therefore make unauthorised seller detection systematic.

B10 Digital continuously monitors brand sales networks to identify unauthorised distributors and fraudulent sales sources. This guide explains how to map your brand’s sales network step by step.

🔎 Step 1: create a seller inventory

Identify the platforms and sellers listing your brand. Establish your official sales locations, then analyse marketplace sellers absent from that list.

• Search for your brand's name on platforms like Amazon, Trendyol, Hepsiburada, N11, Etsy.
• Record product titles, descriptions and seller names in one table.
• Compare against the authorised seller list.
• Check vendors' price policies (very low price usually signals unauthorised sales).

🧭 Step 2: use Brand Registry and brand portals

The majority of marketplaces offer brand-specific verification and monitoring systems:

• Amazon Brand Registry: After registering your brand, you can see who lists your products and report unauthorised sellers.
• Trendyol brand protection portal: Uploading a trademark registration certificate lets you identify sellers using the brand and submit removal requests.
• Hepsiburada brand notification: The unauthorised-seller form can remove listings using your brand name or images.

Completing official verification gives the brand verified-owner status. Counterfeit or unauthorised-seller reports are then handled faster than ordinary user reports.

📊 Step 3: analyse price and stock anomalies

The most prominent feature of unauthorised sellers is that they break the original price policy. You can track price anomalies with the following metrics:

• SKU-level price differences: for example, sellers pricing 20% below the official price.
• Average stock movement per seller: sudden increases may indicate counterfeits or parallel imports.
• Comment history and delivery time analyses (original vendors are usually more consistent).

The B10-developed Seller Risk Score algorithm combines these signals into a 0–100 risk score for each seller. High-risk sellers are added to the review list automatically.

🧾 Step 4: collect and report evidence

Build an evidence chain after identifying an unauthorised seller. Each record should include a dated screenshot, product URL and seller details. These records may support takedown requests to platforms or be used as evidence in legal proceedings.

📈 Suggested KPIs:

• Detection rate: For what share of branded products were unauthorised sellers found?
• Mean Time to Detect (MTTD): Average detection time.
• Unauthorised seller reduction: The rate of reduction in the number of unauthorised vendors over a 3-month period.

These metrics can be used to measure the maturity level of your brand protection processes.

Conclusion: Unauthorised sellers can cause revenue loss and erode trust. Effective detection combines appropriate tools, data analysis and continuous monitoring. B10 Digital protects brands across digital marketplaces with CounterShield™ and Marketplace Intelligence solutions monitoring sales networks around the clock.

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