Manav Sethi, the group chief marketing officer and head of digital strategy at Askme, which owns the Indian online marketplace Askmebazaar.com, talks about the problem that counterfeit goods pose to the e-commerce industry and how the company tries to manage the issue.
How does the counterfeit market in India impact your business and how do you ensure businesses are selling authorised products through your site?
It impacts us a lot. We work as an online platform that helps small and medium enterprises and holds their hands through making their products available online. When I get an SME on board, there is a thorough process and a series of checks to make sure that whatever they are representing is genuine. We do these checks every quarter. To manage that control is a challenge for an online marketplace. At the end of the day, the customer experience and the brand promise is something that is affected if I don’t keep those checks in place.
What happens if a trader does sell fake products through your marketplace?
If consumers tell us that a particular shoe, for example, is fake, our teams go back and check them again, and if found fake, we blacklist the merchant for one quarter. We also share the credentials of that merchant with other e-commerce places as well. It’s something that impacts us as an industry.
We have implemented … that if someone somehow goes through a bad experience and has bought a counterfeit or fake through Askmebazaar, we will return your money no questions asked.
Are brands doing much to solve these problems?
Three to four quarters ago, a brand told us that a particular retailer on our online storefront was selling a brand that was not original and not authorised by us. We ordered three or four items as a ghost consumer and our teams went through their quality checks, and it turned out that the identification as fake was spot on and we blacklisted that retailer. I’m not at liberty to disclose the name of the brand – it was an electronics retailer.
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