Your product description shows up on a competitor's listing, word for word, including the typo you never fixed. That is not a trademark problem. It is a copyright problem, and it has a faster filing path than the trademark complaint most brands reach for first. Your listing copy is an original work, the moment you wrote it, and the DMCA notice for copied text moves at the same speed as the one for copied photos: expeditious removal, which platforms interpret as 24 to 48 hours for a clear case.
The reason brands miss this is that they think of the DMCA as a photo tool. It is not. It covers any original expression, and a product description that you wrote is original expression. The listing that copied it is infringing whether or not the product it sells is genuine.
Run a reverse image search on your hero product photos. A copied listing usually reuses the brand's own photography, and the search surfaces the original product page and every copy of it. A seller who shot their own photos rarely matches a brand catalogue exactly, so the photo match is the tell.
A counterfeit seller needs the listing to look real, and the fastest way to look real is to use the real photos. They scrape them from the brand's store, the marketplace listing, or Instagram, and repost them on the fake listing, often on the same marketplace. The listing looks identical: same photos, same copy, sometimes the same brand name. The buyer cannot tell the difference until the knockoff arrives, and by then the counterfeiter has the money and the brand has the one-star review.
That theft is also the detection method. The photos are unique to the brand, and a reverse image search finds every place they appear. The seller who photographed the product themselves will have different angles, different lighting, different backgrounds. The seller who stole the photos will have pixel-identical copies, and that is a finding, not a suspicion.
Start with the hero image: the main product shot, the one every listing uses. Search it on Google Images and on TinEye, and run the lifestyle shots too, because some sellers steal the secondary images and shoot their own hero. Save the results, including the URLs, the dates, and the seller names, because the results are evidence for the takedown, not just a discovery tool.
Do it on a schedule, not once. New fake listings appear constantly, and a search run once finds the fakes that exist today. Weekly searches catch the new ones while they are small, before they accumulate sales and reviews. Keep a list of the URLs found and the takedowns filed, so the repeat offenders stand out. A seller who appears three times is not three sellers, it is one seller with three accounts.
A photo match plus a price that is far below the real one is enough to file. The takedown notice should include the original photo URL, the infringing listing URL, and a statement that the photos are the brand's copyrighted work. The platforms typically confirm within 12 to 24 hours on a clean complaint. File on every copy, not just the first one, and file in parallel across platforms, because a seller who loses the Amazon listing and keeps the eBay one has not lost anything.
And watermark the photos going forward, but understand what a watermark does. It deters casual theft and it proves ownership when the photo appears elsewhere. It does not stop a determined seller from cropping it out. The reverse image search is the detection, the watermark is the evidence, and the takedown is the action. All three together are the system.
Keep reading: Who we protect covers a nearby case in this series.
Uploading an image or pasting its URL into a search engine that finds other pages using the same or visually similar images. It surfaces copies of your product photos on other listings.
The hero product shot first, then the lifestyle and detail shots. Some sellers steal the secondary images and shoot their own hero, so the hero alone is not enough.
It proves the photos were copied, which is strong evidence, especially combined with a price far below the real one and a seller with no brand relationship. It is the standard basis for a takedown notice.
Weekly for your top products. New fake listings appear constantly, and catching them while they are small costs less than catching them after they have sales and reviews.