• Home
  • News
  • Retail
  • Alibaba increases counterfeit tactics to stay off black list

Alibaba increases counterfeit tactics to stay off black list

By Don-Alvin Adegeest

loading...

Scroll down to read more

Retail

London - Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is hoping its lobbying tactics in the US will prevent its online stores from being listed on the US government's list of pirated products amid increasing complaints about counterfeit goods on its trading platforms.

Alibaba is currently the world's second largest retailer after Wal-Mart, and has written to the US Trade Representative’s office, The Wall Street Journal reported, highlighting recent efforts to protect intellectual property including a new mechanism aimed to expediting requests to take off fake merchandise from Alibaba’s platforms.

Alibaba now has English language platforms for foreign brands

In the letters, the company said it had also implemented more stringent processes for verifying seller identities and set up an English-language platform for brand owners to register their intellectual property rights and submit complaints.

Alibaba’s marketplace Taobao had previously been on the agency’s list of problematic markets for pirated goods until 2012, when it was removed for its efforts to address complaints by brand owners.

The problem of counterfeit goods being traded on Alibaba’s platforms has come into scrutiny over the past year, after luxury group Kering filed a lawsuit in New York against Alibaba on allowing the sale of counterfeit goods and a US clothing group urged the US government to label Taobao a “notorious” market for fake goods.

Alibaba has a dominant position in Chinese e-commerce, with its Amazon-style Tmall.com platform believed to command more than half the Chinese market for business-to-consumer transactions. Its eBay rival, Taobao, holds more than 90pc of the consumer-to-consumer market.

Image:Alibaba

Alibaba