I am the final stages (reading I am closing tomorrow!) on a shopify store with a great ranking and traffic.
I discovered 2 days ago that the largest competitor to this website bought a similar url (say the store I want is greatproducts.com and competitor bough greatproduct.com) and redirect traffic to his own site.
Competitor is in the exact same narrow niche, but does not pretend to be the site I want to purchase, since he probably knows this would be trademark infringement. The trademark of the original store does sadly not include the plural version of his name.
Seller of the website seemed to say
Hey @ethosseed there wouldn’t be any SEO benefit to them doing this anymore so you wouldn’t need to worry about search engines indexing their website instead of yours especially if it’s a new domain but your website has been around for a while.
Where it could become a problem though is direct traffic. If people manually type your domain in they may type the singular rather than the plural and will end up at your competitors website. That said, if they are manually typing it in you could assume they know your brand already and when they arrive at the wrong website they may leave to do a search instead.
Basically I wouldn’t be losing any sleep over it, keep doing what you’re doing and creating relevant and engaging content and you can’t really go wrong.