Direct answer: A counterfeit cease and desist works best against identifiable, legitimate adjacent sellers: small importers with real addresses, businesses with something to lose. It should identify your rights, the specific infringing goods, the actions demanded with a deadline, and the consequences, and it should only be sent when you are prepared to act if the deadline passes.
The cease and desist letter is the oldest tool in trademark enforcement and the most misused. Sent well, it ends infringement by a reachable seller in a week for the cost of a letter. Sent carelessly, it warns a network to move hosts, change names, and delete the evidence you were about to use. The difference is targeting and follow through.
This guide covers which sellers a letter can actually move, the elements a credible letter contains, how to deliver it so it is received and documented, and what to do on day one after the deadline, because a threat not executed is a lesson to every seller watching.
Letters work on sellers with a fixed point: a real business name, premises, a registered company, assets, or a reputation in a trade channel. A small importer, a local shop, or a marketplace seller operating under their true identity often stops at a well built letter, because the cost of defiance suddenly has a number attached.
Letters do not work on anonymous offshore networks, disposable storefronts, or sellers already cycling identities monthly. For those, a letter is free intelligence about your evidence and your timeline. There, silent documentation, test purchases, platform reports, and payment action should run first, and any letter should follow seizures or account actions, not precede them.
Identify yourself and your rights with registration numbers. Identify the infringement specifically: the products, where they were offered, dates, and any test purchase results, with photos where they strengthen the file. State the demands plainly: stop selling, remove listings, disclose the source and remaining inventory, and account for what was already sold, each with a date.
Name the consequences accurately: suit for trademark counterfeiting, statutory damages, and injunctions in strong statutory regimes, notification of platforms and payment processors, and customs attention for importers. Accuracy matters. Demands and threats beyond what the law supports undermine the letter and, in some places, create risks for the sender. Counsel should review the template once; after that it scales.
Send it so receipt is provable: tracked delivery to the business address, plus email where an address is known, keeping copies of everything with the case file. Set a deadline proportionate to the demands, commonly seven to fourteen days for a first letter to a reachable business, and calendar it the day the letter goes out.
If the seller responds, keep the exchange factual and in writing where possible. Settlements should be papered: a short written agreement covering cessation, inventory disposition, source disclosure, and a payment term where appropriate converts a promise into something enforceable, and it is the document you will want if the same goods resurface under a cousin's storefront.
When the deadline passes in silence, act: file the platform escalations, the payment complaint, or the suit the letter described, promptly enough that the connection is visible. Sellers in the same trade talk to each other, and a brand known to follow through gets compliance from letters alone at a rate a bluffer never sees.
Track outcomes per letter the way you track any enforcement channel: sent, complied, settled, escalated, ignored. That record tells you within a year which seller profiles your letters actually move, what your template earns per send, and where the letter step should be skipped entirely in favor of silent action.
Related reading: Poshmark Counterfeit Reporting: How Buyers and Sellers Report Fakes, Etsy Counterfeit Reporting: How to Report Fakes on a Handmade Marketplace, and How to Report Counterfeits on eBay: VeRO, Evidence, and Repeat Sellers.
For identifiable, legitimate adjacent sellers, a letter can resolve things faster and more completely than a listing removal, including source disclosure. For anonymous or offshore network sellers, report and document first, because a letter mainly warns them. The seller's identifiability is the deciding factor, not a fixed house rule.
Cessation of sales and listings, removal of infringing content, disclosure of the supplier and remaining inventory, and an accounting of units sold, by a stated deadline. Demands should match what you could plausibly win or negotiate. Overreaching demands that a recipient's lawyer recognizes as empty weaken the credible parts of the letter.
Seven to fourteen days is common for a first letter to a reachable business, shorter where sales are fast moving and harm is compounding. State the exact date. Whatever deadline you set, diarize the follow up action for the day after; the credibility of every future letter you send depends on this one being enforced.
A brand can send its own letter, and many do at scale with a reviewed template. Have trademark counsel draft or approve the template and the escalation criteria once, especially the damages and consequences language. Individual high value or litigious targets deserve individual legal handling rather than the template.
Do what the letter said, promptly: platform escalations with your documentation, payment processor complaints, customs information where imports are involved, or filing suit where the scale justifies it. Record the ignore in your tracking. An ignored letter followed by visible action is not a failure; it is the evidence trail that makes the next step stronger.