A counterfeit listing is a product listing on a marketplace or storefront that misrepresents a fake or unauthorised product as genuine, using a brand’s name, images or trademarks without permission.

Why it matters

Every counterfeit listing that stays live undercuts the genuine product on price, siphons off sales that should have gone to the real brand, and risks handing a customer a product that doesn’t meet the brand’s actual quality or safety standards, damaging trust and reviews that the brand itself never controlled.

How it works

Counterfeit listings are usually built by copying a brand’s real product images, titles and descriptions, sometimes altering them just enough to avoid an exact-match filter, then listing at a lower price to attract buyers. Detecting them reliably means matching a listing against the brand’s actual product catalogue at a granular level, not just checking for the brand name in the title, since sellers often omit or misspell it deliberately.

In practice

A counterfeit listing for a well-known consumer product might reuse the brand’s official product photography, list under a near-identical title, and undercut the genuine price by a significant margin. Buyers searching by product name have no easy way to tell it apart from the real listing until the item arrives, by which point the marketplace’s return window and the brand’s reputation have both already taken the hit.

How Truviss helps

Truviss’s Marketplace Scanner matches listings against a brand’s real catalogue at SKU level (see SKU-level matching) rather than by keyword alone, so counterfeit and unauthorised listings are flagged with fewer false positives, and files takedown requests automatically once a listing is verified as an infringement.

Frequently asked questions