Hot counterfeit topic this month: Advent calendars
There has been a huge trend in the overseas factories to produce ‘object’ advent calendars this year. In fact, the ecommerce marketplaces are saturated with them. You can purchase all types of advent calendars, containing a multitude of different items. Amongst these are gnome advent calendars, sea glass Christmas Tree advent calendars and emotional support crocheted vegetable advent calendars.
The pictures show real life 3D objects, a desirable and exciting surprise in every window on the run up to the big day. However the truth is these pictures have been taken from their original owner’s Etsy or ecommerce store, without permission and grouped together as the enticing contents of an advent calendar.
This is heart-breaking for the original owner but purchasing these creations is also incredibly disappointing for the buyer. As these images are copied, these advent calendars fillers don’t look anything like the images. In fact, what you usually get is a 2D flat resin picture of the original. Small, flat and incredibly underwhelming.
As we near Christmas these advent calendars will begin to disappear and the ecommerce marketplaces will be pumped with the new factory trend. As a buyer, read the reviews, read all of the descriptions thoroughly and make sure you look at ALL of the pictures available. If you see one image which shows the product and it doesn’t look like the lead image, then that is the product you are buying. This image is usually hidden at the end of a scroll or bottom of a page.
Ecommerce marketplaces IP Infringement removal times
Each month we’ll give a round up of any changes in the Ecommerce Marketplaces reporting systems and their current response times.
We’ve seen a large increase in Walmart's responsiveness over the last year. During the summer of last year Walmart was struggling to work through requests and removals were taking over a month to be processed. However there has obviously been a great deal of restructure in the IP department and we’ve seen quick and reliable responses to removal requests. We continue to see much slower response times from Walmart Canada vs Walmart USA. This is particularly surprising given that the reporting process is the same across both countries.
On the flip side of that, Shein is really struggling currently. Responses take over a month and their reporting process is unnecessarily long. They are also one of the few platforms that don’t accept Patent submissions without a court order. They are also unable to provide seller information when it is requested. Making it difficult to make contact with a seller of a patent infringing product. Due to all of these, the rise of Design, Trademark, copyright and Patent Infringements steadily rises on the Shein platform.
TikTok Shop has really been leaning into its automation this month. This has meant incredibly quick removals for registered IP, some within 5 minutes. However it has also meant that it has become increasingly difficult to register IP with their reporting platform. Formats that were once accepted are now thrown back and copyright registration has become a long drawn out struggle. Unfortunately, due to this automation, there are now no humans to report the problems to, meaning complaints go unheard and processes don’t seem to be evolving. The IP reporting for TikTok video still uses their original system and is still suffering from extended response times.
The same applies to the Amazon.com platform. We have recently had a case of a customer who has a large number of Trademark infringements however Amazon’s automation can’t recognize that the US Trademark is registered. Support is also automated so the bot can’t see there is a problem either. With no human problem solving there is potential for problems to live and multiply within Amazon's systems. This has impacted average removal times for Amazon.com as these issues push up the total time taken to for a listing to be removed.
Let us finish on some Marketplace highs. Amongst the daily challenges of reporting infringing listings there are also some incredibly reliable marketplaces. Those that consistently remove infringements from their sites when asked and do so promptly and reliability. Our tops this month have to be Fruugo UK and the Alibaba platform. Reliable systems and good consistently, what more could a Brand protection company ask for. Fruugo constantly have removal times of less than 1 working day
For more details about how to submit infringement reports to Ecommerce Marketplaces, Download our Brand Protection Playbook.
Marketplace Removal times by IP Types
Removal times based on average IP type have seen much change versus the previous period. You can see in charts below that in some cases such as Shein they have much slower response times for some IP types. For example TikTok video has a much higher takedown time for copyright requests versus trademark. TikTok videos are primarily reported based on this being the primary reason items are taking down and we have limited data for trade marks on TikTok video as we usually based on copyright.
Patent removal times are amongst the shortest. However, it is worth noting that several marketplaces do not act upon patent infringement notifications. In these cases IP Moat would typically remove the listings based on trademark, copyright and other methods.
If you have any questions about how your IP can be enforced across different marketplaces, you can get in touch with our team here.
Look out for our Annual Marketplace Report 2025 which will be released January 2026.
