With the advent of e-commerce websites and its rising popularity among the public, it is quite frequent to witness scams by exploiting latch-on mechanisms on e-commerce websites. You may have observed several times that you order any product online and you get cheap-quality products under the brand of the same company. It is the result of latching on by unauthorised sellers. This also leads to customer dissatisfaction. This gives the third-party unauthorised sellers the liberty to list their products under the name of the reputed brands that are already market leaders of the existing segment on the e-commerce websites. Now, this practice is unjustified to the original sellers of the products and can result in the brand name getting infamous and losing reputation among the customers.
This case study is about Tibra collection, the plaintiff who was suffering from a similar problem. Tibra collection is a clothing brand that produces its clothing apparel for men and women and lists them for sale on the website of Amazon and defendant no 1 Flipkart. As the ethnic clothing and fashion culture boomed in the past years, Tibra collection made a lot of sales on the website of Flipkart by providing good quality products to the consumers and generated a total revenue of 2.96 crores which is a great milestone for any budding seller in the e-commerce space. Even Flipkart appreciated the sales generated under the brand by awarding it “Golden seller” status, highest seller tier on Flipkart. Tibra collection was enjoying a great number of sales and reputation because of its sky-rocketing business tactics and strategies to make an astonishing revenue in crores. Tibra collections also became a renowned brand in the online clothing and apparel segment not only that but the satisfying reviews were another major evidence that the customers were enjoying the products they received from the Tibra collection, everything was going smooth. The problem began when one day Tibra collection received a feedback email for one of the products, the email quoted the dissatisfaction of a customer associated with the product that he/she has bought from Tibra collection, Plaintiff asked for the product invoice from the customer. After checking through its records of delivery plaintiff came to know that the product which was being complained about by the customer was not delivered by it. Plaintiff was so confused about the wrong delivery of the product that took place under the trademark and brand name of “Tibra collection” as the invoice contained the name of the brand.
Here are some of the tips to remove hijackers on your Amazon and Flipkart listing to make sure that you don’t get caught up in similar scams.
After thorough research Plaintiff came to know about the false sellers that were listing their products under the name of Tibra collection, Plaintiff tried to raise its grievance to Flipkart, Defendant no 1 but the e-commerce giant didn’t take any action on it and completely ignored the issue as the Plaintiff had applied but not obtained a trademark certificate for the mark Tibra Collection. To secure the rights for its Trademark and the reputation of its brand name Tibra collection, the Plaintiff filed a lawsuit against Defendant no 1 for allowing third-party unauthorised sellers Defendant no 2, 3, 4, and 5 from unlawfully using the brand name of Plaintiff and listing similar products on Defendant no 1 website.
The Plaintiff was represented by Shri Anshuman Upadhyay and Shri Naseem Sheikh, of Mark Shield who highlighted the fact that the Defendant No 1 Flipkart has failed to address the issue appropriately as latching on allows the e-commerce giant to earn more commissions by creating unlawful competition as such counterfeiters sell their poor quality products cheaper than the market price thereby diverting consumer traffic on the portal of Flipkart.
The Saket court considered these arguments vital and came up to a conclusion that all the products that the defendants were listing on their website were counterfeits of plaintiff and ordered to restrain all the defendants from listing their products under the brand Tibra collection as such illegal use might result in irreparable damage which may cause to the brand Tibra collection.
