Dec 21, 2024
21 Best Ecommerce Brand Protection Tools to Safeguard Your Reputation
For many ecommerce businesses, success is all about brand reputation. Today, Shoppers are more skeptical than ever and will research your brand before purchasing. It could jeopardize your sales if they find anything suspicious—like counterfeit goods or negative reviews about unauthorized sellers. Ecommerce brand protection strategies can help you create a secure and trustworthy online presence by effectively fighting against these threats. In this article, we’ll explore actionable strategies to help you protect your brand and reputation from fraud, boost customer confidence, and drive sustained growth.
One powerful tool to help you achieve these goals is Bustem’s copycat detection tool. Automatically scanning the web for counterfeiters and unauthorized sellers can help you quickly identify and eliminate these threats so you can get back to business.
Table of Content
What is Ecommerce Brand Protection?
Ecommerce brand protection refers to the processes and strategies that secure a business’s online reputation. This includes protecting the brand’s intellectual property, ensuring customer trust, and monitoring unauthorized digital marketplace activities. Ecommerce brand protection is critical to preventing revenue loss and protecting the brand’s image and reputation against the harmful effects of:
Counterfeits
Rogue websites
Social media impersonation
The Importance of Ecommerce Brand Protection
Ecommerce brand protection is paramount for several compelling reasons that directly impact the success and sustainability of businesses in the digital marketplace:
Safeguarding Brand Reputation
A brand’s reputation is one of its most valuable assets. Infringements such as counterfeit goods, unauthorized sellers, or intellectual property theft can tarnish a brand’s image, diminishing consumer trust. Proactive brand protection measures are vital in preserving the integrity and perceived value of the brand.
Maintaining Consumer Trust
Consumers expect authenticity when they purchase products online. Encounters with counterfeit or substandard products can erode their trust, not just in the offending seller but in the brand itself. Protecting the brand ensures that customers consistently receive the quality and authenticity they expect.
Protecting Revenue Streams
Counterfeit products and unauthorized sales can significantly eat into a brand’s revenue. A brand can safeguard its legitimate revenue streams by protecting its intellectual property and controlling its distribution channels.
Avoiding Legal Complications
Failure to enforce trademarks and copyrights can lead to legal complications, including dilution of rights. Consistent brand protection efforts ensure that a brand’s intellectual property rights are not weakened over time.
Preserving Competitive Advantage
A brand’s unique identity, including its trademarks, designs, and patented technologies, is central to its competitive advantage. Protecting these elements prevents competitors and counterfeiters from unfairly capitalizing on a brand’s innovation and market position.
Enhancing Customer Experience
A secure and trustworthy shopping environment contributes to a positive customer experience. A brand can enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty by ensuring that only genuine products are sold under its name.
Global Compliance
As businesses expand globally, they must comply with various international laws and regulations related to intellectual property. Brand protection efforts ensure compliance with these legal requirements, avoiding potential fines and sanctions.
The Different Types of Ecommerce Brand Protection Tools
Brand protection starts with foundational tools that can be used across multiple platforms to safeguard your brand’s intellectual property and marketplace presence. These generic tools are essential for monitoring and enforcing brand integrity, regardless of where your products are sold.
Here’s an overview of the most common types of generic brand protection tools:
IP Monitoring
Intellectual property (IP) monitoring tools help brands track their trademarks, logos, and product images to ensure that no one uses their intellectual property without permission. These tools scan online marketplaces, websites, and social media platforms for potential infringement. By detecting misuse early, brands can take quick action to protect their legal rights and prevent unauthorized use of their brand assets.
Price Monitoring
Price monitoring tools are vital for enforcing Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) policies and ensuring authorized sellers are not undercutting each other or your established pricing guidelines. These tools track product listings across platforms, allowing brands to quickly identify MAP violations or price disparities that could damage their brand image and profitability.
Listing Monitoring
Ensuring that your product listings remain accurate and free from counterfeits is crucial. Listing monitoring tools scan online marketplaces for unauthorized sellers or counterfeit products that may be listed under your brand’s name. This allows brands to detect and report any listings that violate their policies, helping to maintain the integrity of their product offerings.
Product Serialization
Serialization is a method of ensuring that each product sold is genuine. By assigning a unique serial number to each product, brands can track and verify the authenticity of items throughout the supply chain. This is particularly important for high-value goods or products prone to counterfeiting, as it easily identifies counterfeit items.
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21 Best Ecommerce Brand Protection Tools
1. Bustem: Your Guardian Against Content Theft
If you run an e-commerce store, content theft is likely one of your biggest concerns. So-called copycats can steal the following to mislead your customers and increase their sales at your expense:
Your images
Product descriptions
Videos
Ads
Many more
Bustem is a robust copycat detection and removal tool for e-commerce merchants. Our platform automatically scans billions of websites to identify unauthorized use of your store's content, including:
Images
Videos
Headlines
Text
Once we spot copycats, we streamline the entire takedown process with pre-filled DMCA forms and comprehensive case management. Built by people who know the game inside out, our service offers:
24/7 monitoring
Instant detection
Bulk takedown capabilities to protect your brand assets
With over 2M DMCA notices filed daily and businesses losing $29B annually to content theft, we've made protection simple and cost-effective. Whether dealing with competitors using your product images, copying your ad content, or stealing your copy, Bustem helps you identify and eliminate copycats efficiently.
Get started with a free scan and see who's been stealing your content. Find and take down copycats with one click today with Bustem.
2. Red Points: Advanced Brand Protection Services
Red Points is a digital revenue recovery platform with various solutions to help brands protect their content and safeguard revenue. Red Points’ Brand Protection Services is a leading solution to help brands find, track, and remove counterfeit listings sellers. They are a top choice for businesses because of their ideal combination of:
Experience
Expertise and valuable features
Red Points stands out from other solutions because they use machine learning and AI technology to refine their search for fraudsters. They have also optimized their takedown process with automation power and an innovative validation system. With a flat-fee model and a non-stop approach to protection, Red Points is also an extremely cost-effective option.
3. BrandShield: Safeguarding Your Brand from Digital Risks
Brandshield is a brand-oriented digital risk protection tool. Their software is designed to detect and remove online scams. Through robust technology, they will scan the internet for you to find and analyze potential threats. Brandshield’s brand protection service uses AI and machine learning to see, monitor, and take down infringements ranging from counterfeits to brand impersonators and grey market dealers.
When it comes to removals, they have a success rate of over 98%. Their experience within the industry makes them an ideal solution for many businesses worried about protecting their brand.
4. Smart Protection: Comprehensive Brand and Revenue Protection
Smart Protection is a global brand, product and content protection company. They are focused on driving online sales and safeguarding your reputation. Their brand protection solution allows clients to gain comprehensive visibility of potential threats within digital channels via 24/7 monitoring and enforcement.
They use AI technology to scour the internet, ensuring you can uncover any misuse or fraud that affects your brand.
5. BrandMonitor: Detecting Counterfeits Across Multiple Channels
BrandMonitor works online and offline to safeguard brands from unauthorized sales, counterfeits and intellectual property abuse. They protect over 450 brands with a brand protection solution that embraces the best technology available. They comb online marketplaces, social media, apps, search engines, NFT marketplaces and global domain name databases to find fakes.
Their detection process is powered by machine learning, logo detection and product recognition. Once they reveal potential fakes and scams, they allow you to set up rules for automatic enforcement, ensuring that your brand has swift and effective protection.
6. OpSec: Comprehensive Brand Protection Solutions
OpSec experienced operators within the brand protection industry. They have been defending businesses against scamming and counterfeiting threats worldwide for many years. They are experts at linking their online and offline protection efforts to ensure that companies can comprehensively protect themselves against bad actors.
OpSec’s brand protection service has features tailored to fight against counterfeiting and copyright infringement. At the same time, their solution allows you to strengthen your licensing, recognition and registration processes.
7. Zerofox: Unified External Cybersecurity for Brands
Zerofox is a unified external cybersecurity platform that supports brands from protection to response. Their mission is to curb cyber-attacks ability to operate freely by exposing, disrupting and taking down the threats they pose.
Zerofox protects over 10,000 brands across finserv, retail and more. Zerofox’s brand protection capabilities include:
Holistic brand coverage
Scalability
AI-based analysis
Through automation, they help businesses take infringing content as quickly as possible.
8. Bolster: Automated Brand Protection from Fraudsters
Bolster is built around a deep learning-powered brand protection platform that delivers automated protection from phishing sites, scam content and copyright infringement. They are trusted by leading brands, including:
Uber
Dropbox
Booking.com
Change.org
Coinbase
Their brand protection solution allows you to execute fully automated zero-touch takedowns within minutes. Continuous monitoring and AI-driven real-time detection can help your business uncover threats 24/7. On top of all that, Bolster has full dashboarding to help track your brand’s coverage and receive insightful data points.
9. Corsearch: Enterprise-Level Brand Protection Solutions
Corsearch combines AI-powered technology and decades of industry expertise to provide elite brand protection solutions for a variety of businesses. Their clients include:
Unilever
Mondelēz
Decathlon
Their brand protection solution includes coverage for counterfeits, brand abuse, distribution threats and online and offline disruption. Image search technology and automation rules ensure that they can support your desire to find and takedown bad actors wherever they are operating.
10. Scribos: Digital Brand Protection Against Counterfeiting
Companies like Nivea and Mercedes-Benz trust Scribos digital brand protection platform to deliver 360 degrees of protection against scammers. Their mission is to fight counterfeiting, grey market activities and overproduction while opening avenues for customer interaction. They accomplish this through:
Constant monitoring
Intelligent data analytics
Takedown support
You can tailor your protection to their authentication, interaction, ordering, and licensing modules within their digital platform.
11. PhishLabs by Fortra: Digital Risk Protection for Brands
Phishlabs by Fortra aims to provide digital risk protection through curated threat intelligence and complete mitigation. Their brand protection solution safeguards reputable brands on the web, social media and across digital advertisements. Their brand protection capabilities include:
Continuous automated data collection
Expert mining methods and API integrations
With their solution, businesses can streamline the takedown process and quickly protect their brand from external threats.
12. DoubleVerify: Protecting Your Brand from Ad Fraud
DoubleVerify is a digital advertising tool that helps protect the quality and transparency of the online ads ecosystem. As for its brand protection capabilities, DoubleVerify works excellently in combating a specific type of online fraud called ad fraud. Why is it important? Because ad fraud steals your advertising budget and throws it down a digital black hole.
DoubleVerify captures all the keypoints:
DoubleVerify prevents fraudulent clicks and impressions from wasting your resources.
Detects unusual click patterns and suspicious traffic sources.
Blocks fraudulent activity.
Provides personalized reports with detailed data.
This ensures your hard-earned advertising dollars reach real people who might be interested in your products or services, maximizing your return on investment (ROI). Without this protection, you might unknowingly pay to advertise to bots or irrelevant audiences, ruining your campaign’s effectiveness and potentially damaging your brand image.
13. BrandVerity: Monitoring Affiliate Marketing Programs
BrandVerity is a brand protection software that monitors and manages affiliate marketing programs. It can help you by ensuring compliance with your affiliate guidelines and detecting your affiliates' unfair activities.
We don’t live in a perfect world. Many scammer affiliates make commissions on things like:
Ad hijacking
Coupon spoofing
Arbitrage
Many other ways of brand abuse
All of these harm your brand image and cannibalize your marketing efforts. According to the CHEQ study, affiliate frauds cost advertisers 1.4 billion dollars globally.
BrandVerity offers real-time monitoring of online sources and analyzes the content your affiliates use to promote your brand. The tool checks if it complies with your program rules and flags all suspicious traffic sources & authors. If you discover an affiliate scam, BrandVerity allows you to:
Contact the authors of suspicious content
Terminate affiliate agreements
Report them to the appropriate authorities
14. Cofense PhishMe: Phishing Protection for Brands
Cofense PhishMe is a cloud-based phishing simulation & detection tool designed to protect brands from attacks, focusing on phishing emails. It is like a detective club with millions of members worldwide. Cofense PhishMe scans every email in your inbox and catches sneaky emails that your regular inbox may miss.
Besides, the tool provides you with simulations of actual phishing attacks. You can choose real-life tricks hackers can use and send training phishing emails to check your stuff’s reaction. Cofense PhishMe simply understood that the most effective way to protect any organization is to teach employees how to behave when someone tries to cheat them. No tool, even the one with zillions of features (you’ll never use), would be more effective than aware people!
15. Brand24: An AI Tool for Brand Reputation Management
Brand24 is an AI-powered media monitoring tool that perfectly streamlines your reputation protection efforts. The tool offers real-time online brand monitoring by tracking public brand mentions published on multiple digital channels:
Social media such as:
Facebook
Instagram
X
LinkedIn
TikTok
YouTube
Telegram
Twitch
Non-social sites including:
News sites
Blogs
Forums
Podcasts
Video sites
Review platforms
Others
You can imagine Brand24 as a friendly dude who constantly reads and analyzes everything people publish about your brand. That’s a good personification because Brand24 not only gathers brand mentions. The tool offers a variety of analytics features to protect your brand reputation on the highest possible level.
Sentiment analysis is the real queen of Brand24’s capabilities. In short, the tool automatically attributes each mention detected to one of three categories: positive, negative, or neutral. That helps you identify potential reputation issues early and prioritize your responses.
16. Copyscape: Monitor Your Web Content for Theft
Copyscape is an effective brand protection tool for helping your organization identify stolen website content created for your web pages. It can even detect content that is not a replica but is still too close for comfort. Copyscape prevents threat actors from copying and pasting your website content and presenting it as their own.
To that end, Copyscape’s search facility discovers plagiarized content and works to end identified theft. As a bonus, it is cost-effective. The service is free, and Copyscape offers payment plans if your business requires a more customized program.
17. Google: Optimize Your Business Profile for Brand Protection
Claiming and optimizing your Google business profile is a critical brand protection tool. It's essential for local SEO, to protect your company's brand and prevent revenue loss. Claiming your business profile allows you to optimize, control edits, add information, and answer questions on your business page when people search for your company or similar companies.
There is no downside- claiming your business profile allows you to control your brand and provides a platform for transparent communication with your customers.
18. MX ToolBox: Email Protection for Brand Safety
MX ToolBox is another effective but unique tool that turns the brand protection gaze inward, offering an email protection feature. Companies receive phishing and fraudulent emails that can impact their online brand daily. If your company's email is hacked and sends inappropriate or unprofessional emails to your client list, the potential damage could be irreversible and devastating.
MX ToolBox offers a specialized fraud center that helps prevent malicious actors from contacting your customers, identify email-based attacks, secure your online identity, and maximize the return on investment of your email campaigns.
19. Hootsuite: Brand Protection for Social Media Management
Hootsuite has an established reputation as a social media management tool. If a business has a significant online presence that it consistently tries to improve, Hootsuite is a go-to for managing, strategizing, and optimizing online profiles. Nevertheless, Hootsuite has another card up its sleeve; it is an excellent brand protection tool.
Hootsuite offers a unique brand protection toolkit that's available for installation. The toolkit provides:
Comprehensive guide on brand protection
Tips to avoid common social media pitfalls
Pointers for optimizing Hootsuite's software
Ways to monitor competing brands
20. Global Brand Database: Trademark Monitoring Tool
Attaining a trademark is vital in your brand protection strategy, but it can't be the only step. Unfortunately, a trademark does not offer guaranteed protection from malicious actors seeking to misuse your brand's signature.
The Global Brand Database lets you monitor your brands and trademarks proactively. This brand protection tool lets you search trademarks by image or text in brand data. It also explores multiple national and international sources, including trademarks and official emblems.
21. Talkwalker: Social Listening for Brand Protection
The name says it all. Talkwalker helps organizations “stroll” through social channels, online media, and over 30,000 brand databases. This software provides a comprehensive real-time picture of customers' thoughts about everything from your:
Events
Products
Campaigns
Talkwalker is also multi-lingual- it monitors what's happening on all social channels in 187 languages. Talkwalker is an excellent way to track the impact of your global message and brand awareness.
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10 Key Metrics to Consider When Choosing an Ecommerce Brand Protection Solution
1. Scale: Understand the Size of Your Infringement Problem
You want your budgets spent wisely and efficiently, so when you realize that infringers are targeting your products and you want to find a solution to protect your brand, the best and first thing to do is always to understand the scale of the infringements.
Do you have only one counterfeit incident, or are you aware of the piracy over a few sites already, and there might be more?
Is the brand protection solution scalable according to the type and size of incidents you have? A qualified brand protection solution for e-commerce should be capable of auditing and assessing the current risk your brand is facing and offering a corresponding solution.
2. Reach: The Broader the Search, the Better
Depending on whether you are looking to resolve a single case or deal with multiple, or you are looking for continued protection after the audit will affect whether this is a relevant consideration for you. Technology has allowed for an increasing number of platforms and methods of brand infringement–from counterfeit goods sold over social media to search engines leading consumers to fake websites, and counterfeits are even being sold on apps like:
WhatsApp
Wallapop
Cybersquatting diverts traffic from your brand’s website, threatening businesses and consumers while surrendering trademarks' control. If your company seeks to solve multiple IP infringement cases and monitor the brand continuously, then the search capacity of the service will be vital.
3. Efficiency: Speed in Removing Infringements Matters
Whilst a long-term solution should be the absolute priority, speed in removing infringements is crucial in a brand protection solution to stop the effects of counterfeiting and regain brand control. A reliable brand protection service will advertise its removal rates, and you should pay attention to the ratio of detections to eliminations and the average time from detection to the removal of infringements.
Efficiency rates can be increased with automated tech and through industry relationships, ensuring that ISPs and marketplaces prioritize requests for rapid takedowns.
4. Prioritization: Not All Infringements Are Created Equal
A good brand protection solution will prioritize and deal with the most damaging infringers first and provide brands with data and insights relating to the most critical infringements. Armed with this data, brands can see the scams that impact their revenue and reputation the most.
Prioritizing these threats by tackling the most damaging ones first and leaving the relatively trivial matters to the end can make a brand protection strategy more efficient.
5. Success Rate: Measure Previous Performance
How successful has the brand protection solution been for other brands? This is a question to ask before investing entirely in any particular solution. In general, you should expect success rates of above 80%, with a maximum three-day window to successfully remove infringements.
The success rate is a key metric. All reasonable brand protection solutions should display their success rate on their product page or in client case studies. Anything below 80% is usually not worth your time or money. Anything above 90% is excellent and will indicate that their brand protection solution is a seriously compelling tool.
6. Zero Gap Migration: Seamless Integration with Existing Tools
Can you connect your current brand intelligence tools with the new brand protection software without issues? Tools and solutions are often best utilized alongside other innovative tools. While solutions can function fine in isolation, it is usually more convenient for brands to have a whole suite of solutions that work well together.
Zero gap migration is a metric to evaluate how well brand protection software may pair with your existing brand intelligence tools. You have nothing to worry about if you don’t have such tools.
Nevertheless, many of the best brand protection solutions will be configured to function alongside brand intelligence tools so that you can comprehensively and flexibly manage your online brand experience.
7. Reporting: Track Your Brand Protection Progress
Most brand protection solutions offer a reporting system based on an app or visual web dashboard. The software, which is simple to work with and easy to understand, can save time and reduce additional training costs. A sound brand protection system should do more than simply detect infringements – it should be able to report in detail and highlight websites and geographical areas of particular risk.
It is essential to consider whether you can access IP infringement data instantly through a portal or whether you have to wait for monthly reports. Real-time data is the desired form of reporting, allowing you to see infringements as they are detected.
8. Auto Learning: The Best Solutions Evolve
Technology is ever-evolving, and so are counterfeiters as they attempt to avoid detection. Does the solution you are checking learn from its search results? Innovation is a must in the digital global counterfeit industry; staying up-to-date with keywords that identify future threats to your brand and using given data to customize the service delivered keeps you winning ahead of cyber criminals.
Brands that do anti-counterfeiting rights constantly work to adapt and integrate new technologies to remain one step ahead of counterfeiters.
9. Industry Expertise: Human Support Matters
Some degree of human analysis is a good idea, as no matter how many tasks technology can automate, it can’t (yet) replicate years of industry experience. Expert analysts can direct the technology and predict new trends, whilst an in-house legal team can assist with any extrajudicial actions required, such as those involved in taking down a fake website.
Besides, anyone who’s ever gone through the pain of automated customer service will agree that it’s nice to have a knowledgeable human to speak to in a time of need.
10. Return on Investment: Measure the Value of Brand Protection
The best brand protection solutions will allow brands to see the return on investment they receive for using a brand protection solution. Here, you can calculate whether using a brand protection solution is worth your time and money. It is a key metric that may be difficult to find when using average brand protection companies. At the same time, the best brand protection providers will proudly display their ROI metrics and use them as a vital selling point for their solution.
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Find and Take Down Copycats with One-click Today
If you run an online store, there's a good chance you've had to deal with content theft at some point. Whether it's a competitor using your product images, copying your ad content, or stealing your copy, it can hurt your business. Not only can it negatively impact your SEO rankings, but it can also confuse potential customers and lead to lost sales. The best way to deal with copycats is to stop them before they cause harm to your business. Bustem helps you identify and eliminate copycats efficiently.
Get a free scan to identify who's been stealing your content. Use Bustem’s copycat
detection tool to find and remove copycats with just one click today!