Everything you need to know about Ubuy

 

An e-Commerce site from Kuwait, Ubuy seems to be relatively unknown amongst European brands and consumers. However, the marketplace has quite a wide reach across the globe and chances are your brand will bump into it at some point in the future.

 

Except your products may already be available on it without your knowledge?

 

 

What is Ubuy

Founded in 2012, Ubuy is an e-Commerce platform based in Kuwait. The company is active in over 180 countries, including the US, UK, Germany, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, India, China, Japan, Australia and South Korea.

 

Screenshot of https://www.u-buy.be/en/about-us displaying the parts of the world Ubuy ships to

 

Ubuy has both a desktop and mobile version, and promises to bring “quality products from luxury brands” to its customers worldwide. The platform hosts over 300 million “brand new, unique” products in categories like fashion, jewellery, household products, electronics, baby care items, and even groceries.

 

In contrast to these claims, the marketplace’s general feel is somewhat tarnished by frequent mistakes in grammar and style on its sites. For example, the homepage is inconsistent in using capitalisation, uses the wrong preposition several times and omits an article from a sentence.

 

Screenshot of ubuy.com displaying several incorrect formulations: items" should be a capital I, "From" should be lowercase. Instead of "from 2012", it should say "since 2012." The second line is missing a "the" between "From" and "Past". Also, "From" should be "For" and written in lowercase here.

 

In addition, Ubuy publishes little to no information about its turnover and other economic figures, which makes its claims hard to verify.

 

 

How does Ubuy work

In its own words, Ubuy defines itself as “...a Global Search Engine. We source the product from the original retailer/distributer. The difference between the cost of product and what is collected is the sourcing fee.”

 

This means that Ubuy aggregates the offers of other sellers on its platforms and sells them on to buyers across the globe. Unfortunately, this type of retail carries many inherent vulnerabilities, as shoppers may not be aware who (and where) they’re actually buying from.

 

According to its main website, Ubuy sources its products from sellers based in six countries or regions, namely the US, the UK, Japan, South Korea, China, and Hong Kong. However, depending on the buyer’s country, not all of these, or on the contrary, additional origin countries may be available.

 

Screenshot of ubuy.com displaying the countries and regions Ubuy sources products from

 

For example, shoppers in Belgium can choose products from all of the above countries plus Germany and Turkey, while Japan and Korea are not available as sources to those based in Switzerland. 

 

 

Shopping on Ubuy

Prospective shoppers first have to select their country of residence, then the market they want to shop from.

 

Screenshot of https://www.u-buy.be/en/category/groceries-gourmet-food-16310101 displaying random product listings

 

Shoppers can enter a product name into the search bar, or select a product category and view all available listings in that segment. Filters help consumers narrow down their results regarding product price, brand, category, etc.

 

Once they placed the desired product(s) in their shopping cart, consumers can head to checkout. Ubuy accepts all major credit cards, as well as PayPal, Direct Debit and Klarna.

 

Depending on the distance between the source and destination countries, shipping can take anything between 2 and 10 business days. If you need the product earlier, you can choose express shipping for an additional fee.

 

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IP infringements and Ubuy

As noted earlier, Ubuy’s business model is very vulnerable to fraudulent sellers and other dishonest parties who may infringe on your brand’s IP rights. Product listings don’t display any information about the seller besides their shop’s name and origin country.

 

Screenshot of a random product listing on https://www.u-buy.be/en displaying seller information

 

Moreover, the “Contact Seller” link on the product page leads to Ubuy’s own contact page, further limiting buyers’ options to learn more about the seller.

 

Ubuy has an IP protection policy that details the steps rights holders need to take to report an infringement of their trademark or copyright. Ubuy promises to review all claims and respond within ten business days.

 

However, Ubuy doesn’t proactively look for potentially infringing content on its platform. This means that until somebody finds them, infringing listings can remain active and cause immense damage to your brand’s revenue and reputation.

 

Luckily, there’s something you can do about it.

 

 

Online brand protection on Ubuy

globaleyez’s marketplace monitoring service is the first line of defence against potentially IP infringing listings. We can monitor over 150 online marketplaces globally, which is how we came across several questionable product listings published in our clients’ name on Ubuy.

 

Armed with keywords like your brand name, product name, or anything else you want us to look for, our state-of-the-art software tool traxster crawls the marketplaces of your choice and flags down suspicious listings.

 

Since fraudsters often advertise with stolen or copied product pictures, we recommend a round of image monitoring to detect fraudulent content like ads, single webshop offers, etc. not present on marketplaces. If you like the DIY approach, you can even subscribe to our software tool infrimage and monitor your copyrighted images yourself.

 

Once we have all the infringing listings collected, it’s time to learn more about their sellers and where the products come from. A test purchase is the best way to do that, since product listings themselves often contain little to no useful details. However, an actual purchase reveals this data and more, giving us enough information to move forward.

 

Finally, enforcing your rights and demanding the removal of the infringing content (product listing, picture, single webshop, etc) is the final step in this process to protect your brand’s invaluable IP rights.

 

Conclusion

Ubuy is a global platform that allows consumers to purchase products from international markets. Unfortunately, fraudsters have excellent ways to insert themselves into this process and spread their IP infringing products all over the world, damaging your brand’s revenue and reputation.

 

Don’t let this happen to you. Contact us and let’s set up a comprehensive online brand protection programme to safeguard your brand’s valuable IP rights.