Fake Trademark Infringement Report and Shopify Legal Team

Shopify Discussion
1

Just wanted to have this documented here. Shopify Legal team is very unprofessional. A competitor has submitted a trademark infringement report….by pretending to be a trademark owner. They submit a report using information freely available online on USPTO website. Name of the trademark owner, registration number, trademarked brand etc. Legal team just takes their word for it without asking for any ID and takes products down on our website.

They have knocked out three websites like this.

Trademark owner has emailed Legal saying someone is using his name to submit fake reports, but they just reply thank you for bringing this to our attention and nothing happens after that. Our store has had products offline for almost two weeks now. I have sent the legal team countless emails on how we can resolve this, I have sent authorization letter from the trademark owner along with the scan of his passport. Silence. Absolutely nothing.

We have put a lot of time and effort into our website but it seems like it is time to move to another platform. Beware of this as apparently the system is so broken, they can take the website offline without any investigation.

2

Hi @Gagulya012

I suggest you talk with the Shopify support team about urgently looking into this issue as the email won’t work in your situation.

If you have made the decision to switch the platform, then I suggest you go with BigCommerce. It is the 2nd best e-commerce platform to use.

3

Yeah :grin:

Support team is separate from legal team. They are like therapy. They listen to what you have to say, say how sorry they are and that they understand the urgency/severity of the situation and that they will contact the responsible specialists.

The best thing that comes out of that is Legal then sends yet another generic reply, probably to reset the ticket counter so it doesn’t go expired or red in their system.