Filing a takedown against a site that turns out to be an authorized reseller is a bad day. It damages a business relationship, and a report signed as accurate that was not accurate can come back on the person who signed it. So before calling something a copy, it has to be clearly a copy.
The difficulty is that a reseller and a clone look alike in most of the ways people check first.
What both of them have
A legitimate reseller will often have:
- Your product names, because it sells your products.
- Your product photos, because you sent them, or because it is allowed to use them.
- Your brand name in its page titles and its ads.
- Links back to your store.
- The same theme as you, because it is a popular one.
All of these show up on a clone too. None of them alone tells you which you are looking at. At Fjerne we call these weak signals: a site with only weak signals stops at “possible”, however many it has.
What only a copy has
Some things only end up on a site when someone copied the store wholesale, with a tool, rather than building their own. These are strong signals, and a site needs at least one before we call it a likely copy:
Your tracking IDs. Your analytics measurement ID or your ad pixel ID in the site’s code. A reseller has its own. A copied theme carries yours along, because the copying tool does not know to remove it.
A page that still names your store. Every page can declare its own address in its metadata (the canonical URL and the og:url tag). Copying tools often leave yours in place, so the clone’s pages say, in their own code, that they are your pages.
Files loaded from your store. Images, scripts or styles fetched straight from your domain, rather than copied.
Your catalogue under your product handles. On Shopify, each product has a handle: the last part of its address, like /products/linen-throw-natural. A reseller that lists your products picks its own. A clone that imported your catalogue has yours, often half of them or more, often all.
Most of your text, word for word. Not a product name or two, but your home page copy, your about page, your refund policy.
A new domain with your name in it. A domain using your brand name, registered in the last few months through a different registrar from yours, next to your store’s domain that is years old. A reseller copies photos and text too, but does not register a brand-name domain from scratch.
A worked example
Take a fictional store, linenandleaf.com, and two sites selling its products.
The first, a homeware shop on its own long-standing domain, lists twelve Linen and Leaf products with the brand’s photos and product names, and links to linenandleaf.com from its brand page. That is five weak signals and no strong ones. It is very likely a reseller. If you are not sure, ask your wholesale team before anything else.
The second, linenandleaf-outlet.shop, lists all 40 Linen and Leaf products under the same product handles. Its home page metadata names linenandleaf.com as the page’s own address. 92% of its home page text matches. Its domain was registered nine days ago at a different registrar. That is four strong signals: it is a copy.
Your own other domains
One more case looks like a perfect copy and is not one: your own second domain. A store with country sites (.com and .ca) or a second sales domain serves the same pages on each, and scores as an exact match.
Two checks tell these apart, and a cloner can fake neither. Shopify answers a request on every domain connected to a store with that store’s id, so two domains served by the same Shopify store are the same business. And a store lists its own regional sites in hreflang tags on its home page, which a clone never appears in. Fjerne runs both before calling anything a copy, and treats a domain that passes either as yours.
Before you file
If a site shows only weak signals, find out more before reporting it: check your list of authorized sellers, and ask whoever manages your wholesale accounts. If it shows strong signals, write them down as facts (“its pages name linenandleaf.com as their own address”, “92% of its home page text matches”) rather than conclusions about who runs it. Facts are what the platforms act on, and they hold up if anyone asks.
Fjerne’s findings are written that way. Each one lists what was measured, labels the result likely or possible, and flags anything that might be a reseller or one of your own domains before you report it. Your first finding is free.
