Learn all about popular German marketplace Hood

 

Founded in 1999 and launched in 2000 in Germany, Hood began its life as an online auction platform. Later on, Hood expanded its operations and became a general online marketplace offering a large array of products in various categories - a career quite similar to that of global e-Commerce giant eBay.

 

Today, analysts count Hood among the ten biggest e-Commerce platforms in Germany. Other experts classify it as one of the twenty best online marketplaces in Germany.

 

Hood has its headquarters in Cologne.

 

 

What is Hood

Hood offers a variety of products in categories like electronics, fashion, jewellery, household items, sport and hobby, books, entertainment and furniture.

 

Screenshot of the homepage of hood.de

 

In its mission statement, Hood explains that it aims to give German small and medium enterprises the opportunity to enter e-Commerce. Consequently, Hood strives to set the lowest possible selling fees among German online marketplaces.

 

In contrast to other marketplaces, Hood doesn’t charge a basic fee or listing fee. Hood sellers only pay a sales commission of 4-9% to the marketplace after each successful transaction.

 

Prospective sellers can choose from a basic or professional account. Basic account-holders are entitled to list no more than 500 products, each with a maximum of eight pictures while sellers with a professional account can list 20,000 products with 16 pictures each.

 

Hood.de registers 1.32 million monthly visitors, most of them from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The company’s annual revenue is estimated between $2-5 million.

 

 

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Hood and corporate social responsibility

Besides supporting small and medium enterprises, Hood also prides itself on furthering the entire German economy by paying all its taxes to its home country. In addition, Hood values the well-being of its employees and offers all kinds of perks as part of the employment package, like flexible office hours, home office options, healthy snacks and fitness club memberships.

 

When it comes to the protection of the environment, the company aims to operate as environmentally friendly as possible with several initiatives in place. These include restricting business travel, supporting efforts to conserve forests all over the world, and offering climate friendly shipping options to Hood sellers.

 

As a result, Hood claims to have become climate neutral as of 2023.

 

 

Shopping on Hood

The marketplace follows the popular tile format often favoured by discount platforms like Wish or AliExpress.

 

Screenshot of random product listings on hood.de

 

Clicking on a listing leads to the product page, where more information is available about the goods in question as well as its seller. In general, it seems that each seller page features the shop’s name, contact information, customer ratings, as well as, in accordance with German laws, the seller’s VAT ID number.

 

Screenshot of the seller information section of a random product listing on hood.de

 

 

The state of IP rights on Hood

Similarly to many other e-Commerce platforms, Hood has an IP protection policy. This policy explains that Hood is committed to the protection of IP rights and calls all of its sellers to abstain from infringements.

 

However, just like many other online marketplaces, Hood doesn’t take responsibility for the content of product listings posted by its third party sellers, which means that vendors may indeed publish listings and offer products that infringe on your brand’s IP rights.

 

Unfortunately, we can verify this possibility as we’ve come across several trademark-violating product listings from different industries on the platform.

 

Hood has recognised this problem and created an IPR programme for rights holders to notify the marketplace about infringing listings.

 

 

Online brand protection on Hood

Since Hood doesn’t actively look for infringing listings on the marketplace, it falls to rights holders to detect and report these to Hood for removal. Luckily, this doesn’t mean you have to scroll through the myriad of product listings on the marketplace - that’s what globaleyez is for!

 

Our marketplace monitoring service flags potentially IP infringing listings on Hood and over 150 other online marketplaces worldwide. We have developed traxster, our very own software tool for the purpose. traxster works with keyword-based searches, looking for listings with your brand name, product name, or any other search term fraudsters may use to imitate your brand.

 

Once we have a group of potentially infringing listings, further investigations may be required to learn as much about the seller and the origins of the product as possible. Our test purchase service does that and more: we provide you with court-admissible documentation about all our findings that you can use in a potential lawsuit against the fraudulent sellers. Indeed, we’ve conducted several test purchases for software products on Hood, gathering fraudsters’ personal data for legal follow-ups.

 

No brand protection service is complete without the removal of the infringing content, which is why we offer our enforcement service. This means that we demand the removal of the infringing listing (or any other type of infringing content, including pictures, domains, etc) from the internet. And since fraudsters are rarely deterred by one single removal, our sustainable enforcement service offers to check back regularly and remove any offers that have popped back up since our last action.

 

 

Conclusion

Hood is an important part of the e-Commerce landscape in Germany. Despite the marketplace’s best efforts, fraudulent sellers may choose it as their platform to reach customers and publish listings that infringe on your IP rights.

 

Don’t let this hurt your brand; contact us and let’s set up an effective online brand protection strategy together!