A marketplace listing undercuts your price and the brand alarms go off. But is it a counterfeit, or is it your genuine product being sold through unauthorized channels? The two look the same in a search result, and brands burn money and goodwill treating them identically. The enforcement playbook is completely different for each, and the first step is knowing which one you are looking at.
A counterfeit is a fake: a product made to look like yours that was never manufactured by you or anyone licensed by you. Selling it is trademark infringement, full stop, and every marketplace on earth has a takedown process for it. A gray market good is genuine: your actual product, manufactured properly, but sold outside your authorized distribution. A distributor diverting stock to an unauthorized reseller is the classic source. No trademark is infringed by the product itself, which is exactly why takedown filings against gray market sellers so often fail.
This distinction is the entire game. Counterfeit enforcement is a legal and platform process: report, evidence, takedown. Gray market enforcement is a business process: find the leak in your distribution, tighten contracts, and enforce your authorized seller policies. Mix them up and you get denied filings on real fakes and lawsuits on genuine goods.
Start with a test buy. A counterfeit reveals itself in hand: wrong materials, sloppy packaging, misspelled labels, a product that does not match your specs. Gray market goods pass inspection because they are real. The tell is the paperwork: no valid chain of custody back to an authorized distributor, batch codes from a different region, or packaging in a language you never shipped to that market.
Price alone proves nothing. Gray market sellers undercut because they bought cheap from a diverter; counterfeiters undercut because their cost base is near zero. Packaging photos in the listing are a weak signal either way, since both can be copied from your own product page. The test buy is the evidence standard, and it is the one thing you should never skip before choosing a path.
File the takedown with evidence. Marketplaces remove clear counterfeits fast when the filing includes a test buy showing the product does not match the genuine article. Use every program available: brand registries, transparency codes, and repeat-offender escalation. Counterfeiters operate on volume and thin margins; make their listings die quickly and they move to easier brands.
Find the leak. Gray market inventory comes from somewhere in your authorized chain: a distributor selling to resellers against their contract, an employee, or a region with excess stock. Serialization and batch tracking tell you where the units were supposed to go, which narrows the leak to a handful of suspects. Then it is contracts: enforce your authorized seller policy, cut off the diverting distributor, and make the next violation expensive.
On the marketplace side, brand gating and authorized seller lists work better than takedown filings. You are not arguing the product is fake; you are asserting that the seller is not authorized. Some marketplaces support this directly. Others need the distribution-side pressure to do the work, because the listing itself is not violating any IP rule.
The most expensive mistake is filing counterfeit takedowns against gray market sellers with no evidence of fakeness. The filing gets denied, the seller appeals, and you have now documented your own accusation. The second mistake is the reverse: assuming a cheap listing is gray market and negotiating with a seller who is moving fakes. The third is ignoring gray market entirely because "at least it is our product," while the diverted units undercut your authorized sellers and destroy your pricing.
Counterfeit and gray market look identical in a search result and demand opposite responses. Test buy first, identify what you are holding, then file against fakes and follow the supply chain against diverters. The brands that win at enforcement are not the ones that file the most takedowns; they are the ones that file the right ones.