Price Drops, Ghost Shops: Detecting, Proving & Removing Unauthorized Sellers

Hello everyone. Welcome. My name is SJ. I'm joined here with two of my really special friends. We'll get to know them here in just a minute. But as people are kind of trickling in, I want to go over a few housekeeping items. So today, this webinar is part of a larger series called the Vision Series, where MarqVision meets with experts and innovators in AI and brand protection to talk about what we think is coming in the future and what MarqVision is doing to combat this new frontier of brand control and brand protection. So, um, if you have any questions, please drop them in the chat. In the bottom right, we have Christy who'll be answering those. We're not answering questions live because we have a lot to get through and we don't want to take any extra time. So, let's go ahead and get started. As I said, my name's SJ. I'm joined by Jake Morgan, head of brand protection. Give us a wave, Jake. Amazing. And we're also joined by Now, who is leading our unauthorized sales product. So, we'll we'll hear more from Now in just a minute, but we're going to get started talking with Jake, who leads brand protection. Um, and he is going to talk to us a little bit about unauthorized sales. Um, why they're a problem and how MarqVision kind of tackles it. So, let's get started, Jake, with some of the basics. What do we mean when we talk about unauthorized sales?

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So unauthorized sales is basically any sales through a seller that isn't a part of your authorized distribution network or it's sales from an authorized seller but it's outside of your distribution guidelines. So they may be selling things at a lower price or they could be selling outdated stock or they could even be selling sort of damaged goods. Um so it's anything that's not authorized by you essentially.

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Fascinating. Okay. Something I was speaking with I think one of our um product marketing managers yesterday was about when, as Black Friday kind of approaches, some brands even see people buying their deals on discounts and then reselling them for the holidays. Would that at a lower price, would that be considered an unauthorized seller?

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Yeah, absolutely. Anything where they're undercutting you on price and uh damaging your reputation um would definitely qualify.

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I love that. So obviously this is lost sales like they're not you're not getting to sell it. Somebody else is

selling it. Why is this, what makes this a bigger deal than just lost sales?

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Yeah. So there can be really sort of diverse and impactful effects. So if somebody's up undercutting you on price, your minimum advertised price, you can lose the Buy Box on Amazon or Walmart pretty much right away and that will shift the volume away from your authorized partners and it can damage

your relationships with your retailers. Uh and then also it'll erode trust if they get some sort of outdated or

faulty product. Um so it it really has kind of broad uh and meaningful impact.

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Amazing. And why is it, as it stands right now, why is it so hard for brands to stop this kind of behavior?

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So a couple main things. One is that the unauthorized sellers are can be pretty

slippery. They can pretty easily change account names and open up new storefronts and they can use

multiple identities and so that makes it pretty difficult you know to build a strong case for enforcement and a lot of teams kind of hold back on taking action because they don't really have confidence in who's behind an account or they can spend a lot of their time sort of chasing their tail the long tail going after smaller less impactful sellers. Uh, also the marketplaces do not want to be involved in this because they consider it to be an issue between the brand owner and distributors. So those are the two main things.

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So you're not going to get any help from the Amazons or the Walmarts of the world in this situation, right? It's pretty much all on you to to figure out what's going on and address it directly with the with the sellers. How are brands handling this on their own right now? Or like is it just a situation where they just don't know or do they know and they're kind of making up their own solution?

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Yeah, I think they really struggle to wrap their head around it. So they'll um you know go and try and identify sellers on their own and go through their distribution spreadsheets and they can spend a lot of time just kind of honing in on specific sellers. So I think not very well is probably the answer to that question.

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And so you kind of mentioned the you know maybe on Amazon or Walmart their listings disappearing. Um, so can you talk a little bit more about the business impact um, beyond just those listings disappearing? 

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Yeah. So I mean it impacts your bottom line, your revenue and your margin and then also customer trust. So if you don't have sort of a systemic way to identify and and act on the sellers, then you just end up sort of playing endless whack-a-mole um, while the impact happens while sales are just leaking. 

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That's I mean that's a pretty clearly defined problem. I know we've seen um beauty brands, retail brands running into this issue where their sales are just clipping along and all of a sudden they're tanking and they don't really know why and it's because they lost their Buy Box and now they're scrambling and they're trying to figure out where it went, what caused it. And so having kind of a holistic view of this, it sounds like that's going to be the most important thing. Which brings me to your recent keynote speech at IPXLA, which we'll send a link to that um after today's um webinar so you can watch all of it. We're actually going to watch a little snippet of it now um because the unauthorized sales tool that MarqVision

has put together is a really interesting approach to giving brands one source of truth. So it brings in AI powered SKU matching, hourly map monitoring, reseller management, um and so much more. So, we're going to actually take a few minutes and go ahead and watch Jake rock the stage at IPXLA.

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Before tackling your unauthorized sales problem, MarqVision grounds itself with data structured around answering three simple questions. What price is your product being sold for? Who's selling it? And where is it being sold? That might sound basic, but most teams don't have this understanding. The first step in addressing your problem is to take a close look at price. because it's the clearest signal that something is wrong. Our system collects the full picture of your pricing data, which is everything that goes into a customer's purchase, such as advertised price, that is the price initially visible to customers, shipping fees, and total price, the final price the customer will pay before taxes. 

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After we have this data, that's when patterns emerge. We can see groupings by model, authorization status, country, and platform, and quickly determine which model has the most non-compliant listings, what platforms have the lowest price, and which authorized sellers are violating your pricing policy. And because pricing on marketplaces like Amazon changes constantly, our system refreshes multiple times a day. That means you can catch resellers who sneak in price drops during holidays, late nights, and off hours and stay ahead of algorithm-driven pricing. You'll also get a price history graph so you know exactly how to track pricing changes over time and measure the impact of the actions you take. These are near real-time insights you can actually act on and not just look at. This by the way goes way beyond basic monitoring. Most tools stop at lifting listing level snapshots. This is flawed because it means you're still stuck with all of the heavy lifting, leaving you with endless manual audits, managing spreadsheets, and multiple vendors, and a lot of guesswork.

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Doing this on your own for a few products may not seem too complicated, but what happens when your brand has multiple product lines and variations being offered on a growing number of platforms? That's where AI becomes essential. We built an AI powered model matching engine that automatically groups listings by skew and variant across platforms, geographies, and even local languages. AI model matching enables you to scale across product lines, geographies, and channels through instantaneous categorization of listings and option information down to the SKU level. All of this is completed in the blink of an eye at an impressive 94% accuracy rate. For example, this means you'll know the difference in price between foundation in the original size versus the two pack model and a moisturizer version made for wholesale versus your D2C version. 

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Once pricing issues surface, the next question is who is behind it? But this is where most teams hit a wall because without clear seller data, the trail usually ends in yet another spreadsheet. Marketplaces rarely disclose disclose reseller details. Marq AI was built to surface seller level insights automatically.

Let's take a look at some of the most opaque high- growth markets in the world. These four marketplaces in Asia alone reach over a billion consumers. That's nearly the population of India. They also happen to be the most active reseller ecosystems. Fastmoving, hard to trace, and full of price violators. With over 10 million sellers in our system, Seller Match surfaces the unseen. That connects the dots between the vendors you trust and the resellers quietly breaking your rules. For example, you can discover that a wholesaler like Sun Distribution might also be Sunny Shop on Racketin or Coupang, competing with your own listings and tanking your pricing strategy. Simply upload your authorized list and a list of known rogue sellers. And that's it. You can see MarqAI matching it against live marketplace data, giving you a real-time map of who's authorized, who's rogue, and who's violating your channel policies. From there, engage match sellers directly with seller dialogue. Our system lets you send automated soft notices in the local language and track your message history, response status, and resolution outcomes. No more back and forth between multiple tools, personal phone numbers, and email accounts to locate your last message with sellers.

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Consolidate all communications history right on our dashboard. Even better, Marq AI translates the seller's response back into English, making global seller communications seamless and scalable. So, after answering these three most critical questions, what price is your product being sold for? Who's selling your product, where is it being sold? You can finally focus your investigation and enforcement efforts where they matter most, and respond with strategies that protect both margin and brand integrity. With this centralized brand control hub to address counterfeiting, impersonation and unauthorized sales, you can monitor fakes and scams as they appear. Track price fluctuations by skew seller and channel and surface unauthorized reseller activity and identity in real time. Execute seller level actions for the first time. E-commerce teams and legal teams can work from the same source of truth to set a a clear plan for actionable enforcement to recapture your brand's value.

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Awesome. Thanks for that demo, Jake. Even though you didn't have to do anything, you just got to sit there and relax. Was it weird to watch past self give a speech?

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Never comfortable. Yeah.

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Amazing. All right. So, now we're going to go a little bit deeper with our guest Now who was responsible for building this incredible product, but we didn't make her go on stage. That felt kind. But Now, we're going to ask you a few questions now. Um, in the demo we saw SKU matching accuracy at 94%, 94 plus%. Um, can you tell me why that level of precision matters for enforcement?

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Well, yes, thank you SJ and also for that pun. Um, yes, the 94% um, it's very important and to kind of start with answering your question first, I'm going to go around why is SKU matching important? So I think if you know this, if the brands have been conducting this workflow internally I'm sure they're already well aware of it,  but SKU matching each listing or even the child listing is the most critical part of proper price monitoring. For example you know using the mock brand that we used in the presentation. For example for a beauty brand a facial cleanser with one product or a facial cleanser for two pack are going to be sold as different products. If the product or if the listings are not matched per SKU level accurately, we won't be able to distinguish which listing belongs to two pack and one pack and which is the actual MAP infringing one. So to properly decide like which listings are actually um non-compliant, the SKU matching is critical. But when you only have like five products or very simplified product when you're starting off brand, it might seem manageable. But what happens is when you expand to different sizes, quantities, flavors, even regional offerings, this gets very out of hand. And often brands either give up midway or they keep pouring in resources trying to be able to sustain this. And um that was the importance of the SKU matching. And the level of 94% plus this is important because this is what we recognize internally, but also when communicating with brands: when there isn't a confident enough accuracy or that it will match correctly, people will still be their resource and will still be needed. They will review it, they will edit it, they will delete it etc. So having this level of accuracy really ensures the confidence that the brands and internal users can put into our product that they can really kind of let AI take the control, step away from the dashboard and actually use that time into what matters like interpreting the data coming up with the strategy and executing that.

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Amazing. Amazing. We also saw hourly MAP monitoring across Amazon, Walmart and more. Can you share a little bit more of how that changes how brands respond because it is moving so much faster?

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Yeah. Um we recognize that you know starting off with Amazon their whole success was very much foundational on dynamic pricing which doesn't only happen when people are in the office. It happens multiple times throughout the day. So the most significant change is that this very manual workflow intensive process is all automated. Before, someone had to input a keyword, go to the listings, see if there are any new listings and then refresh on the price or the product listing detail level. This is all automated. So I think that would be the most important um change in workflow to obtaining that visibility or even wider actually, I would say, and regarding like how their workflows would change is that they would be able to move uh smarter. Um I personally think um or Jake please let me know your opinions as well but unauthorized sales it's a very tricky issue because it means they're selling your genuine product which means it's coming out from you. So on one hand they might be the pain in you know underneath your fingernail that's really driving your sales metric or affecting your own listings but also in some way they're still contributing to your revenue somewhat unknowingly somehow. So, it's a very tricky issue, but what MAP monitoring allows is that it prioritizes. It's a more focused and a strategic approach identifying problematic listings, not just sellers who may be actually contributing to your brand share or exposure, but actually is affecting your own listing or metric and things like that and tackling from the most critical and then down. So, it's a more strategic approach, I would say. 

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Amazing. Now, reseller management, that was the other thing that stood out to me. Those compliance notices and MAP violations are all managed in one dashboard. Is that different or similar to what other brands are doing today?

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So this was actually a very positive feedback that we've been getting from our customers or even our customer advisory boards that we have set up with our wonderful marketing team is that um they were actually very thrilled to have different problems across counterfeits, unauthorized sales, seller management, seller communication using like dialogue or things like that all in one dashboard. They were very impressed by it. And before um brands were struggling with you know jumping between SAS tools,

different accounts, different platforms trying to tackle different issues that are arising with their brands. But what we recognize is that when brands have enough um presence in the market and have that customer um popularity per se, um they often uh they don't struggle with just one problem. they struggle with counterfeit, unauthorized sales, um compliance violations, issues, um all that simultaneously. So having that all in the one dashboard was a very um positive feedback. Um, regarding the seller management, um, I think once brands have that listing level visibility regarding, okay, what

listings are currently occurring in the market that are affecting or um, impacting my brand, then they the seller management provides that seller level visibility into, you know, who are actually behind the seller account. Um, how are they connected, where are they potentially arising from, where else do they exist? and um additional data in his site about that on a seller level.

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I love how Jake actually covered that exact topic in his speech was like what are those three questions you have to ask? What are they what are they selling? Who's selling it? And how much are they selling it for? Um and I think that's really it's really cool to see it come together in the product. So, you kind of touched on this a little bit, but I want to talk about Seller Match. So, linking multiple accounts back to real world identities. How does that help brands shift from reactive takedowns to a proactive strategy?

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Yes, this is um a very important part and it kind of connects back to the part that you know unknowingly the inventory is actually coming out from you. So it means the leak is happening you don't know where the water's coming from but you know like with the leak analogy continuing I would say if a reactive approach of requesting individual enforcement is kind of like just swooping up the buckets of water with a tiny bucket and it's just going everywhere. I think Seller Match is what allows us to be like, "Okay, that's the faucet that's broken. I need to go turn that off or I need to do something to divert this water flow outside so it doesn't flood my apartment." Um, so Seller Match basically on a feature level what it does is it cross references the brand's internal data. So it could be a buyer, it could be, you know, customers during a promotion event or a vendor data. And it cross references our database of 10 plus million seller database. And I want to put a huge emphasis that we do have a very strong specialty focusing on Asian and Southeast Asian platforms, which are a rising need for a lot of brands worldwide. Um, we even had a case where a customer actually used this feature and they actually discovered whether their vendors were already acting as a seller in Southeast Asian marketplaces. So that was a case. Um it references key information such as like address, business registration number, phone number to identify the bad actors within your authorized network to ensure that you have a healthy network and you maintain that and you know really turn off that faucet once you identify a leak's happening.

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I love that. I love that analogy. Um Jake, anything come to mind for you as she's talking through the product? As she mentioned, the presence in Asia and Southeast Asia -- as somebody who's firmly sitting in the United States, how do you think that coverage impacts even you know American brands?

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Yeah I think it can be sort of a blind spot for some of the American brands and that's one key differentiator I think for MarqVision is their understanding of that huge market in in Asia and their ability to kind of wrap their intelligence around that, I think that that's not something you find elsewhere. A lot of these companies are focused on just the North America marketplaces. So, and so they're just missing a huge piece of the market.

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Amazing. So, thank you Now for walking us through that and thank you Jake. Um but Jake, I'm going to ask you one final question. Is there anything you can leave us with? Um any final thoughts or final takeaways?

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Yeah, I mean I think I think unfortunately unauthorized sellers are are pretty set up to thrive in the current online environment. Being able to kind of create new accounts at will and and move things around. But I think with the right tools, you definitely can start to see clearly who's selling, you know, what impact it’s having and start to have confident actions. And so I think it is um it is possible to address the issue and start seeing cleaner channels and healthier margins and having stronger retail relationships. So uh I just say with with the right tools, it’s definitely a solvable problem and you can see pretty immediate impact.

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That's a great takeaway. 

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All right, thank you guys for joining us today. If you have any questions, please reach out. This um website will actually redirect to a book a demo page. These are no pressure conversations. I recommend if you have any interest in learning more about the MarqVision product. Go ahead and fill out that form and someone from our brand protection team will reach out to you and walk you through this. They're pretty fun, just like Jake and Now. Um and they'd be happy to answer any of your questions. But thank you for joining us today and we hope you learned something new.

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