Brand protection · Unauthorised resellers
Unauthorised reseller monitoring across channels and markets
An unauthorised reseller is a seller who is not on your list, found somewhere your customers shop. Search every channel in every market for your products from an exit in that market, resolve each seller to a business identity, and compare against the authorised list, so channel teams act on names, not on hunches.
Pay per GB · No subscription · Prices in EUR, excl. VAT
- €2.00
- per GB on ARC Fast, excl. VAT
- −44%
- at 1 TB (€1.12 / GB)
- 185+
- countries, city targeting
- Never
- expires — no subscription
Written for
- Brand protection teams
- Channel and distribution managers
- Selective distribution compliance
- Sales operations for authorised networks
The short answer
- Reseller monitoring is a matching problem: every seller you find is compared against the authorised list per market and channel.
- Grey-market sellers rarely sit only on marketplaces. Search independent web shops, comparison sites, social shops and classifieds too.
- Search each market from an exit in it: sellers that ship to one country are often invisible to visitors from another.
- In the EU, a trade mark owner generally cannot stop resale of genuine goods first put on the market in the EEA with its consent; goods first sold outside the EEA are a different question. That is why the source market matters — and why the conclusions belong to counsel.
The problem
What goes wrong without the right IPs
Only the home marketplace is watched
Unauthorised sellers often start on a smaller country site, an independent shop or a comparison listing. Watching one marketplace in one country finds them after they have scaled.
Seller names do not match company names
A storefront name, a marketplace display name and the legal entity are three different strings. Without resolving them to one identity, the same seller appears as five and an authorised dealer appears as unknown.
Results depend on the visitor's market
Shopping searches, comparison sites and marketplaces show offers that ship to the visitor's country. A search run from your headquarters misses sellers targeting other markets entirely.
No record of what was offered
A channel conversation needs dates, prices, product identifiers and the seller's stated details. A spreadsheet of URLs, half of them dead by the time someone looks, is not a record.
Authorised partners flagged by mistake
An authorised retailer opening a new storefront or listing under a trading name looks like a new seller. Alerting on it wastes time and damages a relationship.
What to collect
What you can collect
- Seller display name and storefront URL
- As shown on the channel. The starting point for identity resolution.
- Business identity
- Legal name, address and registration number where the page shows them. On EU marketplaces traders' contact and register details must be displayed.
- Authorised-list match
- Matched, unmatched or candidate, with the reason. The field every alert depends on.
- Channel and market
- Marketplace, web shop, comparison site, social shop or classifieds; and the country it was found from.
- Product identifier
- EAN/GTIN or model code, so the offer maps to your catalogue and your distribution terms.
- Offer price and condition
- New, used, refurbished — and the price, for MAP and positioning conversations.
- Ships-to and ships-from
- Where the seller says it ships from and to. A hint at the source market of the stock.
- Batch or lot code visible in photos
- Where listing photos show it, it can help trace which distributor's stock is leaking. Record it, do not infer.
- First seen, last seen
- How long a seller has been active per market.
How it runs
How a collection run works
- 01
Load the authorised list per market and channel
Start from your own data: authorised retailers, their trading names, storefront URLs and the markets and channels each may sell in. Matching is only as good as this list.
- 02
Search channels from each market
Run product searches by name, EAN and model code on marketplaces, comparison sites and search engines from an exit in each market, logged out. One rotating exit per query keeps the sweep spread across addresses.
One query per exit, per market14 linesimport httpxGATEWAY = "proxy.arcproxies.io:8000"PASSWORD = "PASSWORD"def search(country: str, url: str) -> str: # Rotating residential exit in the market, no session needed for one page. user = f"USERNAME_pool-arcfast_country-{country}" proxy = f"http://{user}:{PASSWORD}@{GATEWAY}" with httpx.Client(proxy=proxy, timeout=30, follow_redirects=True) as c: return c.get(url).textfor cc in ["de", "fr", "it", "pl"]: html = search(cc, f"https://comparison.example/{cc}/search?q=4006381333931") - 03
Resolve sellers to identities
For each new seller, fetch the storefront or imprint page and record the business details it states. Group display names that resolve to the same entity, and match the entity against the authorised list.
- 04
Capture what needs to be evidence
For unmatched sellers your team will act on, take a full capture the way the parent brand protection page describes: one sticky session, exit read before and after, screenshot, HTML and hash.
- 05
Alert on new unmatched sellers
Report new unmatched sellers per market and channel, weekly, with their offers and identity details. Matched sellers selling outside their authorised channel are a separate report for the channel team.
Setup
Recommended setup
Discovery runs on residential exits because what you are looking for is what consumers in each market are shown; storefront and imprint pages are light enough for the cheaper pool.
| Plan | Role | Session | Targeting | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
ARC Fast Rotating residential | Default for searches and listing pages Residential exits in each market, so offers that only ship locally appear. City targeting is there for local classifieds. | Rotating; sticky for evidence captures | Country + city | €2.00 / GB €1.12 at 1 TB (−44%) |
ARC Basic Rotating ISP | For storefront, imprint and policy pages Seller detail pages change rarely and are light. Resolve identities on our lowest-priced pool. | Rotating | Country | €0.75 / GB €0.59 at 1 TB (−21%) |
ARC Mobile Mobile 4G/5G | For social shops seen on phones Carrier IPs for the public social-commerce pages where the mobile-network view is what you need. Country only, four markets. | Sticky, 5–60 minutes | Country (DE, GB, US, JP) | €3.50 / GB €3.15 at 1 TB (−10%) |
Prices are list prices in EUR, excl. VAT. Volume discounts apply automatically at checkout — full ladder on the pricing page.
Connect
One connection string per market
The country, city and sticky session are tokens in the username. Change the token, change the market; keep the session handle, keep the IP.
http://USERNAME_pool-arcfast_country-de_session-k3f9a1x2_sesstime-10:PASSWORD@proxy.arcproxies.io:8000Swap _country-de for any market you quote. The full grammar is on the residential proxies page.
Illustration
What weekly reseller sweep: 300 products in 8 markets costs
An illustration with round numbers — your pages, payloads and retry rate will differ. The arithmetic is the real price ladder.
Assumptions
- Products × identifiers searched
- 300 × 2
- Markets
- 8
- Channels searched per market
- 5
- Pages per search, images blocked
- 2 at 400 KB
- Cadence
- weekly, about 4.3 runs a month
- Bandwidth per month
- ≈ 83 GB
On ARC Fast
€122.84per month, excl. VAT
83 GB bought in one purchase at €1.48 / GB (−26% volume rung, applied automatically).
The same 83 GB on ARC Ultra: €226.59 at €2.73 / GB. Route only the jobs that need it through the pricier pool.
Storefront and imprint pages for new sellers run on ARC Basic and add little. Evidence captures with full screenshots are heavier per page but rare; budget them separately.
Bandwidth never expires, so a bigger single purchase is only ever cheaper per GB. See the ladder.
In depth
Unauthorised resellers, in depth
Resolving sellers into identities
The hardest part of reseller monitoring is not finding offers but knowing who is behind them. A single distributor leaking stock can appear under several storefront names on several channels; an authorised retailer can trade under a name you do not recognise.
Public identity data helps. Under the EU Digital Services Act, online marketplaces must obtain traders' identity and contact details before letting them sell to consumers in the Union, and display the contact details, trade-register details and the trader's self-certification on the interface where the product is presented. Web shops in many markets publish an imprint or legal notice with the operator's details. Record what is shown, as shown, and match on registration numbers and addresses before names.
- Match on register numbers first — they are unique where names are not.
- Then addresses and domains — a shared warehouse address or website links storefronts.
- Keep candidates separate — a probable match is not a match until someone confirms it.
Grey market, exhaustion and why the source market matters
In the EU, Article 15 of the EU Trade Mark Regulation (EU) 2017/1001 says a trade mark does not entitle its owner to prohibit its use for goods put on the market in the European Economic Area under the mark by the owner or with its consent, unless there are legitimate reasons, such as a change or impairment of the goods after they were put on the market.
That is why reseller monitoring records where stock appears to come from. Genuine goods first sold inside the EEA by you or with your consent and resold by an unauthorised seller raise a distribution question, usually handled under your contracts; goods first sold outside the EEA raise a different one. Distribution agreements themselves are assessed under competition law; the current Vertical Block Exemption Regulation, (EU) 2022/720, entered into force on 1 June 2022.
None of this is something a monitoring pipeline decides. Its job is to give counsel and the channel team the facts: who, where, what, at what price, with what visible markings, found from which market and when.
Why each market must be searched from inside it
Shopping results, comparison sites and marketplaces filter offers by what can be delivered to the visitor. An unauthorised seller shipping only within Poland simply does not appear in a search run from Germany. Running each market's searches from an exit in that market is what makes the sweep complete.
Country targeting is a token in the username — see geo-targeting — and city targeting from a published metro list is there for local classifieds. Residential exits carry the searches; ARC Mobile adds carrier IPs in Germany, the UK, the US and Japan when you need the mobile-network view of a social shop.
Keep discovery to public, logged-out pages and stop at anything that needs an account; the acceptable use policy sets the limits.
Works with anything that takes a proxy URL
- Python requests / httpx
Playwright- Scrapy
Crawlee- n8n
- Docker
FAQ
Questions
Something not covered? Write to contact@arcproxies.io.
What is an unauthorised reseller?
A seller offering your products who is not part of your authorised distribution network for that market or channel. The goods may be genuine, which is what separates this work from counterfeit detection; whether the sale is lawful depends on where the goods were first sold and on your contracts.
How do I find unauthorised sellers outside marketplaces?
Search for your products by name, EAN and model code on search engines, shopping results, comparison sites, public social shops and classifieds, from an exit in each market. Then resolve each shop to a business identity through its imprint or seller page and match it against your authorised list.
Why does the exit country matter for reseller monitoring?
Because channels show offers that can be delivered to the visitor. Sellers that ship only within one country are invisible from another. Searching each market from an exit in it is what makes the list of sellers complete.
Can monitoring show where grey-market stock comes from?
It can collect hints: the ships-from location a seller states, the business address, the product variant code, and batch codes visible in public listing photos. Those help a channel team investigate. Tracing stock to a specific distributor usually also needs your own supply-chain records.
Which plan should I use?
ARC Fast for searches and listing pages, so you see what consumers in each market see. ARC Basic for seller storefront and imprint pages, which are light. ARC Mobile only if the mobile-network view of public social shops matters, in Germany, the UK, the US or Japan.
Can I check sellers that are only visible when logged in?
No. This monitoring covers public, logged-out pages. Groups, private channels and anything behind an account are outside what our acceptable use policy supports.
Sources & review
Last reviewed by the ARC Proxies team. Prices are read from the live catalog at build time.
- [1]EUR-Lex: Regulation (EU) 2017/1001 on the European Union trade mark, Article 15 (exhaustion)
- [2]European Commission: The impact of the Digital Services Act on digital platforms
- [3]EUR-Lex: Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 (Digital Services Act), Article 30: traceability of traders
- [4]European Commission: Vertical block exemptions: Regulation (EU) 2022/720
Brand protection
More on brand protection
Get started
Buy a gigabyte and try it on your own targets.
No subscription, no sales call. Code WELCOME15 takes 15% off your first purchase, and whatever you do not use is still there next quarter.