Mitchell & Ness turns to GenuOne to find counterfeit merchandise on eBay.
When Mitchell & Ness Nostalgia Company started hearing about counterfeit versions of its vintage athletic apparel for sale online, it decided to do some investigating.
The company hired a fulltime person to search eBay, and she unearthed tens of thousands of auctions selling counterfeit Mitchell & Ness products, says Peter Capolino, who is president and owner of the Philadelphia company. Mitchell & Ness quickly realized it wasn’t possible to deal with all the suspected counterfeit sales manually. The apparel maker turned to eBay for help, and eBay referred Mitchell & Ness to GenuOne.
GenuOne is among a handful of software companies with products that monitor Web sites, chat rooms and auctions for counterfeit goods. The software automates the process by searching regularly for certain keyword combinations; filtering and presenting the results; initiating shutdown requests automatically with eBay and other auction sites; and archiving suspicious auctions.
When the software reports its findings, some fakes are easy to identify, such as a Michael Jordan jersey with a Mitchell & Ness label. “Any time the name ‘Michael Jordan’ and Mitchell & Ness appear in an eBay auction, it’s automatically counterfeit. We have no rights to Michael Jordan,” Capolino says.
Other knockoffs aren’t so obvious, but Capolino’s staffer can discern the real Mitchell & Ness gear from the fakes by looking closely at the item and its label.
The payoff is in the numbers: Prior to implementing GenuOne’s software, Mitchell & Ness shut down between 10,000 and 20,000 eBay auctions in 2002. With the GenuOne software in place, it shut down over 135,000 counterfeit auctions each year in 2003 and 2004, Capolino says.
One reason Mitchell & Ness gear is counterfeited so often is that the company’s products carry a higher price tag than other vintage-looking sports apparel. If a counterfeiter wants to sell an O.J. Simpson football jersey from his days at University of Southern California, adding a fake Mitchell & Ness label will increase the asking price, Capolino says. “If you put the label so it appears that Mitchell & Ness manufactured it, you’re going to get $50 to $80 to $100 more for the jersey than if you put Nike, Reebok, Wilson or Rawlings.”
While GenuOne helps Mitchell & Ness work with eBay to shut down huge numbers of auctions, it doesn’t make counterfeiting go away. The fake goods are still out there, and the fraudsters will keep trying to sell them. “The counterfeiters get shut down, and then they come up and reposition their auctions,” Capolino says.
If a repeat offender continues to try to auction phony goods, eBay will ban the user from posting auctions. But the counterfeiters are resourceful and can invent another eBay identity. Nonetheless, GenuOne and other software vendors at the very least are helping companies to make it harder for counterfeiters to find an outlet for their phony goods.
“We’re slowing them down a little bit. Or at least we’re diverting them,” Capolino says. More importantly, Capolino is sending a message to his loyal dealers and retailers that he’s fighting back against the crooks that are siphoning their revenue. “My legitimate e-commerce customers and my legitimate retail customers know that I’m trying. And that gives them a little more faith in us,” he says.
