Geometrical fighting the widespread internet counterfeit goods: how an innovative brand is helping customers to avoid scams

It takes just a few minutes for a counterfeiter to upload an image and description and compete with legitimate businesses. Any brand, anywhere, anytime can become a target!

E-commerce undoubtedly provides brands with multiple opportunities by helping them to better engage with customers and drive revenue up. At the same time, the internet and online marketplaces have made it much easier for counterfeit organisations to take advantage of high-quality brands such as Geometrical.

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The production of Pocket Tripod PRO (a portable ‘tripod’ for iPhone and Android) was extremely thoughtful and thorough, with several years of prototyping and testing to develop a product with the highest quality in the global market.

However, as soon as Geometrical launched it, the company started noticing low-quality knockoffs appearing on websites such as Alibaba and eBay using copied images from the brand’s high-quality product, to sell cheap and malfunctioning copy-cats.

Geometrical’s CEO and Pocket Tripod® designer, Rambod Radmard states: “We must ensure that the perception of our brand is not undermined by counterfeit goods. We have been working diligently to overcome this inevitable threat of counterfeit products”. Rambod’s next bold move was to buy himself a copy of each one of these low-quality copies to take a closer look at his stolen design: “It was a pleasant surprise, none of them actually worked.”

For Geometrical the threat of these counterfeit products has resulted in the loss of revenue for the brand and these consequences have a negative impact on a brand’s reputation and, consequently on consumer’s trust. Aside from a direct loss of revenue, dealing with the negative reviews has been a major challenge as well, which results in an indirect but equally important loss of revenue.

When a customer sees ads for the Pocket Tripod and purchases it, they are expecting a product that works as advertised. However, when they receive a cheap replica instead, they are rightfully upset and leave negative reviews wherever they can. These reviews can be under the company’s own ads, or as social media posts. Since customer’s reviews carry a major weight for new customers when trying out a product from a new brand, the negative reviews dissuade many from purchasing the product and as a result cause an additional loss of revenue.

Geometrical’s strategy to counter this problem has been to provide the right information to the victims of these scams. By asking them to verify their purchase details and encouraging them to report the purchase with their credit card company, Geometrical has been helping many of these scam victims to get their money back and become more vigilant online shoppers.

Of course, all of this results in another unseen cost, which is the hours Geometrical’s customer support team must spend speaking to the victims of these scam, who haven’t yet purchased anything from Geometrical. Additionally, Geometrical has added a help page on the Pocket-Tripod.com website with information about the scam sites, and a form that allows customers to report them in exchange for a store credit. The page also includes close up images of the product and its packaging to help customers identify if they purchased an original product or not.

With that in mind, it becomes obvious that these scams need to be stopped at the source. It’s for this reason that Geometrical has taken this battle to the scammer’s turf and is proactively fighting them on three fronts:

Product listing detection and removal:

Geometrical has enlisted the help of Red Points, a company that specializes detecting and removing listings of counterfeit products. Redpoints uses AI to detect listings that can be potential infringements of Geometrical’s intellectual property across multiple platforms, including Amazon, Alibaba and even Shopify stores. It then handles the removal process automatically once a listing has been confirmed as an infringement. To date, Red Points has detected and removed over 7000 listings that were selling unauthorized replicas of Geometrical’s patented Pocket Tripod.

Some platforms have different policies when it comes to removing counterfeits. For example, to remove a listing on Amazon, even if it infringes one’s patent, there needs to be an evaluation process. For this reason, in addition to Red Points, Geometrical has been enrolled in Amazon’s Neutral Patent Evaluation program, which has been successful in having removed some of the more stubborn listings on Amazon.

As a preventative measure also, Geometrical enrolled its products with Amazon’s brand registry, and protected its listings with Amazon Transparency. The Transparency program generates a unique blockchain code for each unit sold on Amazon, and without this unique code, the product cannot be sold. Using this method, Geometrical ensures any product sold against its Amazon listing is in fact an authentic Pocket Tripod.

Ad listing detection and removal:

The most effective ads are shown on Facebook and Instagram. Previously, Geometrical relied on customers forwarding any suspicious ads for detection and removal by Facebook. However, this method can take days before an active ad is removed, in which time the scammers could have taken thousands of orders. So Geometrical needed to stop these ads at the source, and to do this it enrolled in Facebook’s Brands rights protection program. This program grants access to brands to search all ads running on Facebook and Instagram to find any that infringe their intellectual property rights and have them removed at the source, which has been very effective.

Legal action against counterfeit manufacturers:

Perhaps the most important strategy is to cut the supply of the counterfeits at the source. Geometrical has been able to identify the top manufacturer of the replicas through investigations, and take them to court in China, and enforce their Chinese patent of the Pocket Tripod. This process took years and thousands of dollars in legal fees, but the Chinese courts did rule in favor of Geometrical. The manufacturer was forced to pay thousands of dollars in fines and has been banned from manufacturing the knockoff products ever again. Geometrical continues to investigate manufacturers that are potential suspects to enforce its intellectual property rights.

Not so long ago, consumers were able to identify fakes easily. Now, with the explosion of e-commerce and social media, the lines between real and fake are extremely blurred. Therefore, it’s vital for Geometrical to protect itself and its savvy customers.

Geometrical CEOs has now implemented effective strategies to control the perception of its patented product and help costumers avoid the widespread scams and knock offs proliferating on the internet: “Our patented product now is only sold on Pocket-Tripod.com and Amazon through our official store. We do not have any resellers. When you purchase an authentic Pocket Tripod PRO, the quality is backed by our money-back satisfaction, and lifetime warranty but the most importantly, an authentic Pocket Tripod PRO actually works”