Grey Market Monitoring

Grey market products can sabotage your brand by reducing pricing power, sabotaging sales, and disappointing customers who expect after-sale care. Unauthorized sellers get a free ride on your brand’s marketing and compete against legitimate dealers. 

How does the grey market arise? Manufacturers can feed the grey market in an effort to move more products. Distribution partners can take advantage of volume pricing discounts and then sell excess stock to unauthorized retailers. Authorized dealers can dump products on the grey market to make room for new items and keep up with quotas. It all works against your brand’s reputation at the end of the day. 

If shoppers can get genuine products at a steep discount, then they do not always understand why to buy from authorized dealers. That saps sales from legitimate sources can create unrest in your network of retailers.

Of course, grey market products don’t come with after-sale service or manufacturer warranties either, which can also lead to more problems. You may start to receive multiple customer warranty calls for products that aren’t covered. Customers are turned away and disappointed. They don’t understand why a brand new product wouldn’t be covered under warranty, and your reputation suffers. 

With BrandShield, you can monitor sellers on marketplaces and social media outlets 24/7 to gain control over unauthorized sales. Having accurate information about the flow of grey market goods can help you decide if you need to rethink pricing strategies, modify distributor relationships, or pursue enforcement against offenders. When you control the grey market, you can recover lost sales and safeguard your reputation.