Among the goods they are looking for originals – Kommersant FM

The Wildberries company has begun testing product originality badges. Blue checkmarks have appeared on the pages of some brands’ home appliances, electronics and shoes. When you click on the icon, a notification pops up: “The seller confirms that the product is genuine.” It is reported that so far only products from “famous brands” are involved in the experiment, and the icon is visible on the website, but not in the mobile application. To confirm authenticity, the seller must provide a valid contract with the manufacturer or official distributor, payment information and other documents.

This is probably how the platform is trying to stimulate sales of expensive and prestigious goods, says Dmitry Ermolaev, head of the Moneyplace marketplace analytics service: “We definitely see that the bulk of sales of cheap goods are from 1 thousand rubles. up to 3 thousand rubles. – falls on Wildberries. The site is in first place on the market in terms of sales volume. Therefore, both high-quality sellers trade on it, and a large number of those who buy fakes on Sadovod, for example, Dyson, and sell them openly for a price tag ten times lower than the original.

Now there is an opinion among consumers that if you need to buy high-quality equipment, then you need to order it from Ozon, and if you need something for household use, then from Wildberries. Perhaps the company wants to change its image of itself a little in this way.

Sellers, in turn, understand that Wildberries has tens of millions of customers, and they will definitely get sales. These are two different audiences who understand the value of the original: representatives of the first group will buy the original, and the second will find a cheaper offer. But in general, this is only one of the sales channels.

In general, this checkbox would be beneficial for all marketplaces; it would shift the attention of buyers. For sellers who sell original products, sales would increase, and a natural whitewashing mechanism would occur.”

The “original” mark is also available on Ozon; using this criterion, users can also filter products in search results. In fact, this in no way protects consumers from purchasing counterfeit goods; sites, by introducing such a system, are trying to prevent claims against them, noted the owner of a network of delivery points, Artem Bobtsov: “For example, the seller really provided us with all the documents for this product, we have no reason not to trust them, because we cannot check them . All marketplaces put such a sign, but its value has been greatly devalued due to the fact that it is completely easy to bypass it.

In particular, you can either buy some part of the product from an official supplier, and part from unofficial ones, and thus all the products will be sold under the “original” label; or falsify certificates and declarations. All documents are photoshopped and stamps are inserted, which is what most counterfeit sellers do now.

For example, original Crocs simply due to their price cannot cost less than 8-9 thousand rubles. Go to any site, type in “Crocs”, and you will see just a ton of offers for 1.5-2-2.5 thousand rubles, and they will all be under the “original product” sign. Then there is a huge flow of returns from customers, and everyone incurs costs as a result – both delivery points, marketplaces, and logisticians. And nothing happens. Today no one understands how to deal with this.

At the same time, although there seems to be an official seller and supplier, you will find dozens, or even hundreds of sellers of the same products under the same brand on all marketplaces. All copyright holders are struggling with this, and they have long been asking marketplaces to somehow solve this problem, but it is on the same level as counterfeit goods.

Every day hundreds, thousands of product cards are blocked, and sellers immediately create new ones. It is necessary to create blacklists of sellers that marketplaces will exchange among themselves. Sooner or later these companies will dry up.”

According to analysts at IQ Technology, from July 2022 to July 2023, the share of counterfeits on Russian marketplaces doubled. In the smartphone category it is more than 30%, almost the same in the laptop segment, and in the case of smart watches it is more than 60%.

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Elizaveta Skobtsova