Online Reseller Monitoring: How to Identify and Track Authorized and Unauthorized Online Sellers

How Brands Can Track Online Resellers Using Web Scraping

Monitoring online resellers is a great way to track market prices, understand demand for your product, and monitor your brand reputation. However, most brands still do not know how to track online resellers and how brand monitoring works.

If you want to start a new analytics project to understand how other people sell your brand's products, we will cover everything you need to know about brand monitoring and how to track the secondary market. But first, let's start with the basics.

What Are Online Resellers?

Online resellers, as the name suggests, are those who receive products directly from manufacturers and "resell" them to other consumers. This is a common business practice where companies purchase wholesale orders from manufacturers and sell them to third-party consumers at a slightly higher price.

This is a balanced approach as both suppliers and manufacturers can earn decent profits. However, there are instances where brands may not benefit from such online resellers, so it is important to monitor how these sellers are selling your products.

What Are the Types of Online Resellers?

• Authorized. An authorized reseller is an entity that has permission to directly sell products from manufacturers to consumers. For example, a franchise authorized reseller of products like Apple, AT&T, etc.
• Unauthorized. Unauthorized sellers are those who do not have a license to directly sell products to consumers. However, they still choose to do so. Since they lack a license, they can set their own prices for these products.
• Consumers or secondhand resellers. In many cases, consumers who purchase a product from a supplier may sell it to a second consumer. This is called a secondhand reseller and is often the least profitable. However, in some cases, when a consumer gets a big discount or buys a limited-edition item, there is an opportunity to sell it at a profit.

Why Is Monitoring Online Resellers Necessary?

Monitoring online resellers is becoming an increasingly popular trend due to the growth of e-commerce. To help you better understand this concept, let's look at some reasons why monitoring online resellers can help brands.

• Trademark protection. Trademark protection is a serious issue for manufacturers because online resellers may sell duplicates, low-quality, or counterfeit products. Monitoring online sellers helps track potential sales issues.
• Identifying authorized resellers selling below MAP. MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) is the standard recommended retail price at which, per manufacturer guidelines, every licensed retailer should sell their products. Any resellers offering products below MAP damage the business. Fortunately, monitoring online resellers can identify any reseller violating the rules.
• Identifying unauthorized resellers. Unauthorized sellers take a huge share of a company's profits despite lacking a license to sell. However, manufacturers that monitor secondary markets can identify such unauthorized resellers and stop their activities to ensure a more effective market response.
• Demand/price monitoring. Monitoring resellers also helps companies determine what they should or should not do with product pricing in the future. They can find the optimal balance between demand and price, earning appropriate profits without overburdening consumers in the market.
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What Online Channels Are Available for Monitoring Online Resellers?

Knowing the right online channels to find online resellers is key to controlling their activities. You will likely find many online resellers interacting with buyers and supplying their products at a lower price. This will also help you make accurate estimates of possible prices to follow and market demand for each product.

Understanding these platforms gives manufacturers enough data for analysis. However, it can take some time. This is because there are many methods for monitoring reseller channels. Interestingly, none are as high-quality and effective as automation through web scraping.

How to Monitor These Online Channels for Resellers?

Knowing the best practices for monitoring online reseller channels is key to keeping your business afloat. The basic principle is to browse numerous websites, read their data, and collect the necessary information.

While all of this can be done manually, this approach is not good for large volumes of work. Fortunately, there is a solution, such as web scraping automation solutions.

What Is Web Scraping?

Automated web scraping is the process of automatically extracting information from the internet in a structured format. It involves programs that work on the web on behalf of data collectors. This is a fast and reliable method for gathering information and organizing it for analysis and application. Web scraping is an excellent tool for monitoring online resellers because it simultaneously browses many sites, automatically searching for relevant results.

Typically, building a web scraper requires deep knowledge of programming languages such as Python or Node.js. Fortunately, we at webautomation.io have made web scraping simple and accessible to all users without the need to create or write any code. With one click, you can run an extractor to get the data you need for monitoring online sellers from any of the channels we mentioned.

Now let's discuss which industries should implement web scraping into their products.

Which Industries Need Online Reseller Monitoring?

Almost every industry needs to monitor its competitors, online resellers, and the secondary market. However, this can be costly, especially if there is no major problem or project ROI. Below are industries with the greatest challenges that require active monitoring

1. Sneaker brands; especially brands that produce limited-edition shoes. According to Imperva's 2023 Bad Bot report, over 18% of traffic on e-commerce sites comes from "bad bots" trying to purchase these items for resale on the gray market.
2. Luxury watches; for some brands with long waiting lists for watches. It is necessary to track who is reselling limited watches on gray markets.
3. Luxury goods: Luxury goods, such as designer handbags, are notorious for having counterfeit resellers, and if not monitored, brand reputation can suffer.
4. Consumer electronics: video games, gadgets, and other high-tech electronics.

If you are in one of these industries, you definitely need a web scraping strategy to monitor various online channels in order to obtain information for decision-making.

Conclusion

Choosing the right tool for web scraping is the easiest way to track the activities of online sellers, users looking for secondary and gray market monitoring solutions, and much more. However, we advise using the best web scraping tool you can find for this purpose.