Piggybacking Off a Site/Brand

We mentioned in our previous post how merchants posting on Amazon’s marketplace can greatly benefit by essentially piggybacking off the Amazon brand by passing it off as their own which increases the likelihood that a customer will buy their products.

But what happens when someone tries to completely piggyback off of your site, without your approval or knowledge, and benefit from your brand and sales?

The following is a case study of how a site can pass themselves as another one–and through the darker, more underground realms of the internet can profit off your blood and tears* in creating your business.

Since CPC Strategy’s inception as an early start-up, one of the companies that we’ve most admired along the way and are huge fans of is online shoe retailer Zappos.

Their reputation in the way they run their company and treat their employees is well documented around the web. Throw in 24-hour customer service, and a 365-day, free return policy and you can see that they’re not only a great place to work for, but a place that provides a tremendous buyer’s focused experience as well. It should come as little surprise that their feedback rating is an incredible 4.9/5 based on 1,633 customer reviews.

It was only a matter of time then before someone else would try to benefit off this incredible brand.

Our investigative team* has discovered a non-existent brand that pawns off their success. In essence, it appears that they have submitted a data feed to Google Base that mirrors each and every product that Zappos has, while providing their own URLs which redirects directly to Zappos.

Here are a few examples (click on the picture to go to the URL):

You can see that if you click on the “Nifty Nitty” links–which isn’t a real site, and whose home page is blank–go directly to Zappos’ product pages. We’re not just talking about a handful of products either, “Nifty Nitty” has a link for each and every single Zappos product, all 98,698. To add insult to injury, a lot of their products rank higher than Zappos’ as well, due to some Google Base optimization techniques–so a consumer will be much more likely to get through Zappos via Nifty Nitty than directly through Zappos.

What is the purpose of this?

From what we understand, Nifty Nitty-whose domain information is locked and unavailable to the public-is part of an affiliate network that is making commission off each sale that is made, all at the benefit of Zappos. Plus, since it is Google Base, every click is free, it’s a complete arbitrage opportunity.

*journalistic hyperbole