Challenges for FMCG brands on E-Com platforms

The e-commerce landscape is a fierce battleground where brands battle for ultimate glory, place on the top of the digital shelf and be the preferred choice of customers. Brands need to gear up with strategic planning, insights, and tech to not only boost their presence on e-commerce platforms but also protect brand reputation. FMCG industry is one the most vulnerable threats to brand protection due to the massive level of product assortment and monitoring brands, sub-brands and categories. 

Brand reputation protection on e-commerce platforms

Brands on e-commerce platform strive for enhanced visibility to boost performance across platform and geographies. However, protecting brand reputation on e-commerce and quick commerce platforms also matters as any drift with misinformation will lead to customers driving away from brand. 

Challenges for FMCG brands on e-com platforms

FMCG brands face tough competition on e-commerce platforms across categories, sub-categories and product varies. Monitoring brand and protect at granular level is necessary to identify threats to brand reputation. Some of the major threats to brand reputation are presence of counterfeit products on digital retail platforms, brand Infringements and impersonations, unauthorized sellers, and sellers not maintaining the price parity. 

Counterfeit products

The proliferation of fake products on the e-commerce websites negatively impacts the brand’s digital reputation and revenue streams as unknowingly purchase by the consumer can be a result substandard product or a potentially harmful imitation of the original product. 

According to CRISIL and ASPA report - Counterfeiting does massive damage to the Apparel industry where 31% came across a counterfeit product, followed by FMCG with 28%, Automotives with 25%, and consumer durables with 17%. 27% of shoppers were unaware of purchasing counterfeit products while 37% were willing to buy such products knowing for various reasons like price sensitivity, the lure to own luxury brands, and social motivations.  

A monitoring mechanism can harvest data from unauthorized sellers across eCommerce platforms. This data is analysed on several parameters to identify counterfeits. Multiple attributes are analysed such as product URLs, product titles, pricing violations, name in the title, relevant keywords from reviews, unrecognized sellers, average poor rating, compliance on standard image and PDP content. Based on individual risk scoring, the product can be identified under three categories of good, fake and breaches.

Brand infringement 

Brand infringement goes beyond e-commerce platforms where brands face impersonations issues. Brands also need to monitor what comes across web and social media as it affects brand performance on e-commerce platforms. 

The challenges faced by advertisers are numerous such as intellectual property infringement, fake customer care, job offers, website, and social media handles. Incent fraud, fraudulent coupons and cashbacks also damage brand reputation as when customer arrives on e-com platforms, does not find such discount and lose trust in brand.  An AI ML driven automated process in place to scan similar URLs, pages, websites, social media platforms pertaining to similar keywords, content, visuals on e-commerce platforms and the web can help protect brand reputation and financial damages. Any fraudulent activity needs to be flagged off in real time. 

What are top FMCG brands doing for brand reputation protection?

A street vendor selling abibas shoes, or zaara handbags is a common occurrence that attracts shoppers sometimes knowingly they buy such counterfeit products or just get duped. But when that happens on online marketplaces, the buzz, negative reviews, loss of revenue, and reputation hurt the brand. Fashion and apparel, sporting goods, consumer durable/electronics, and beauty and personal care brands face major damages with counterfeit products on online platforms.   

Combating the counterfeit menace 

The threat is much bigger, lack of awareness and efficient counterfeit detection mechanisms make it even worse.  The rising availability of counterfeit products online has led to an erosion of trust among shoppers.  

Here are some of the cases of online counterfeit products and breaches/discrepancies to identify counterfeit being sold online.  

• Non-branded products sold along with renowned FMCG products as a combo.

• Substantially low ratings and low number of reviews that generally original brand gets. 

• The product image is different from the title or some spelling errors in the title. 

• The brand name in the product image is different from that in the title. 

• Poor image quality - Band name and logo that resembles a popular brand. May be some negative reviews that highlight the bad quality as its counterfeit product. 

• Brand logo on product image but non-brand item sold by unauthorized seller

• Unrealistic difference in the price listed by original brand and counterfeit product on the same online marketplace or on two different e-commerce platforms.

Brand infringement protection measures

A global FMCG brand with mFilterIt identified 16,37,941 cases of brand infringement in between April'22 to June'23 across 7 digital platforms with high efficiency and automated process driven by AI ML and Open-source intelligence (OSINT) tech reducing the detection times down from several days to seconds, this not only protected brand reputation but also saved massive amount of financial investment.

Brand infringement on e-commerce platforms is a major concern for brands. It involves trademark infringement where unauthorized use of logos, brand names, or trademarks, copyright infringement is where copyrighted images, descriptions, or other content are used for selling products, unauthorized resellers, selling genuine products without permission, and often violating distribution agreements brands need to identify and curb them. Such infringement activities require a multifaceted approach involving monitoring, consumer education, takedown process, and reporting with the platforms.

AI ML tech can prove to be the driving force to protect brands on e-commerce platforms and plug the breaches that are red flag for the brands and shoppers. For shoppers, awareness is the key and for Brands stringent proactive measures are required for brand protection e-commerce platforms. The fierce battle on e-commerce landscape is in full swing, the brand integrity is at stake, vigilant monitoring and rapid action is needed to safeguard from the domino effect of brand reputation damage. 

This article is penned by Amit Relan, Co-Founder and CEO, mFilterIt.

Disclaimer: The article features the opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the stance of the publication.