Temu and Shein have become major counterfeit channels precisely because they break the enforcement playbook built for Amazon. Seller churn is extreme, prices are too low for test buys to scale, and takedowns feel like whack-a-mole. The brands making progress treat these marketplaces as a distinct enforcement problem with its own tactics, not as Amazon with a different logo.
On Amazon, a counterfeit seller is an account worth killing: it has history, reviews, and inventory worth protecting, so a takedown hurts. On Temu and Shein, sellers are disposable storefronts spun up in bulk. Kill one and three replacements appear the same day with the same product photos. Enforcement that targets individual sellers is enforcement against an infinite supply.
The price point breaks test buys too. A twenty-dollar Amazon counterfeit justifies a test purchase; a three-dollar Temu listing does not, especially when the listing disappears before the package arrives. And the product photography is often stolen from the brand itself, which means image-based detection drowns in false positives from legitimate-looking listings.
Both platforms run IP protection portals for rights owners, and they are the highest-leverage channel available. Register your trademarks and copyrights in each portal before you need them, and file in volume: these systems are built for bulk reporting, and brands that report consistently get faster action than brands that file occasionally. Treat portal filing as a weekly operation, not an incident response.
Documentation standards are strict, so keep an evidence packet ready for every core product: registration certificates, authentic product photos, and a clear statement of the infringing use. Well-formed filings move; sloppy ones stall. The brands winning here have templated their submissions so a new infringing listing becomes a filed report in minutes.
Since sellers are disposable, aim enforcement at the product level: the listing images, the product titles using your brand terms, the design being knocked off. Image-hash and keyword monitoring across both marketplaces catches new listings faster than seller-based tracking, because the same photos and copy get reused across dozens of storefronts.
When you find the source images, file against every listing using them in one batch rather than one at a time. Bulk filing against shared assets is the only approach that scales against churn, and the portals are designed to accept it. Single-listing whack-a-mole is the trap; batch enforcement against shared assets is the way out.
Cease-and-desist letters to individual sellers are nearly useless here: the seller entity is often a shell, the contact information is unreliable, and the listing reappears under a new name within days. Legal action against the platforms themselves is slow and expensive relative to the three-dollar listings at issue. And marketplace monitoring tools built for Amazon frequently miss Temu and Shein entirely, so verify coverage before trusting a dashboard.
Also skip the temptation to buy and review-bomb counterfeit listings. It feels productive, it changes nothing, and it can create liability. Enforcement capital is finite; spend it on portal filings and product-level monitoring, the two channels with measurable takedown rates.
Run keyword and image sweeps weekly on both marketplaces for your top products, file in the IP portals the same day you find infringements, and track takedown rates per filing batch so you know whether the effort is working. Monthly, review which product lines attract the most counterfeits and consider whether design or packaging changes would make them harder to knock off. Enforcement buys time; making the product harder to copy buys more of it.