E-Commerce Monitoring

E-commerce monitoring services provided by OpSec Security enable brand owners to manage online sales channels and preserve strategic pricing strategies. OpSec’s Internet monitoring services cover e-commerce across the World Wide Web.

Internet Monitoring Services 

• Auction sites, including eBay, ioffer, ubid
• Business-to-business (B2B) trade board exchanges, such as Alibaba, EC21, EC Plaza
• Business-to-consumer (B2C) retail websites, such as Amazon, Drugstore, Overstock
• Web 2.0 social networking sites, including blogs, chat rooms, and message boards
• Other online platforms, including search engine sponsored links and Craigslist online classifieds

OpSec monitors sellers who offer large quantities of deeply discounted products from known counterfeit and gray market distribution areas. The extracted information helps brand owners understand where their products are being sold, who is selling them, and what is their selling price. From this intelligence, companies take action on unauthorized channels to reduce the number of sites and sellers offering illegitimate goods.

Auction Monitoring Services

OpSec Security’s auction monitoring services supports legal and investigative teams to identify infringing auction listings. OpSec’s auction monitoring services provides:

• Classification of key client criteria to identify infringing listings, such as trademark rights, and consumer health and safety standards
• Timely summary reports of infringing listings prioritized by brand, eBay country site, amount of products sold, total product revenues, and other key metrics
• Analysis of online landscape and data trends to assess product and brand exposure
• Termination of infringing listings, including mechanism for client-approved automatic shutdowns
• Recommendations for ongoing monitoring and investigative actions on suspect sellers, additional regions, other sites
• Capture of information for future litigation including the Web posting, product image and description, pricing, and seller data
• Test purchasing program to uncover source and distribution of gray market goods and counterfeit products 

Trade Board Monitoring Services

OpSec Security provides services to monitor hundreds of trade boards in which finished goods and product components are bought and sold at wholesale quantities. Trade boards offer a platform for buyers & sellers to exchange goods. Unfortunately, trade boards also offer a channel in which counterfeit, stolen, diverted, expired, and substandard products can enter the legitimate supply chain. The tracking of movement of goods across trade boards provides useful information on where a product originates and which markets sellers are targeting. By understanding their exposure on trade boards, brand owners can pursue action to stop illegitimate products and components from infiltrating the supply chain and reaching the consumer market. OpSec offers trade board monitoring services to:

• Anonymously monitor hundreds of trade boards to identify postings offering
  • Finished, branded product
  • Product components to manufacture the finished product
  • Equipment, materials, and packaging employed to produce the finished product
• Track postings offering “product for sale” and “want to buy” ads to cut-off the supply from buyers and sellers of unauthorized product distribution
• Identify the most harmful sellers to better focus investigative and legal resources, e.g. trend seller volume across numerous trade boards
• Report infringing postings to select trade boards for removal (some will comply with brand owner requests to remove egregious postings)
• Manage channel compliance of authorized distribution network
• Record and store posting details, including quantities, prices, seller contact information, geographic location 

Online Retailer Monitoring Services

OpSec Security offers services to monitor online retailers in order to analyze and protect a brand owner’s online reseller channels and pricing structures. OpSec’s online retailer monitoring solution includes services to:

• Flag retail websites suspected of selling counterfeit, gray market, or stolen goods
  • Sale of branded products without authorization or in non-compliance
  • Products listed with suspicious pricing and product parameters such as selling below threshold pricing, new colors, and style variations
  • Offering generic versions of patented product in select regions where patent is still in effect
• Link sellers in the hub and storefront landscape of online retailer networks to disrupt operations of larger-scale operators distributing illegitimate products
• Manage pricing structures for online retailers worldwide using geographical analysis of product pricing, map of selling price by product SKUs, etc.
• Gather market intelligence by product, price, quantity, location, and seller details