Faking Off Forever

Fake products are the moths making the growing e-commerce perceivably fragile. If so, then there seems to be no taker to the abandoned thought of who is letting that happen – online companies, brands, or sellers.

- Sandeep Soni

When noted former World Bank economist Andy Xie last year at a business event called e-commerce being ‘all about selling fake stuff and that growing companies must be selling fake stuff’, it perhaps hinted towards the trigger for heavy discounting – cheap fake goods. But e-commerce guys have long negated the argument that the loophole perceivably lies on the seller on-boarding side. If that’s not the case, then for fakes, which though are few and far between yet rising, where does the buck stops?

MARKET PLACE STRUGGLE

The argument presented here has two sides based on the business model e-commerce companies have – marketplace or inventory-led model. Usually businesses act as a platform for connecting buyer and seller of goods without stocking goods. So, the goods are stored at the sellers’ warehouse facility. In such a model where platform acts as a marketplace, the order placed by customer is received directly by the seller who packs and ships the product back to the customer. In case of a counterfeit product shipped, the role of the platform business is questionable.

“Avoiding fake products is next to impossible in a marketplace model as the product doesn’t go through platforms like Flipkart, Amazon etc., on which it is sold,” says Puneet Chawla, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, Jaypore – Delhi-based luxury handcrafted products e-tailer.