Online marketplace Club Factory has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. This time, the company has once again come into the limelight for selling fake goods on its platform and an FIR has been registered against the Indian arm of Club Factory and a couple of senior executives.
The case relates to a customer placing an order for a pair of Nike shoes and upon receipt finding it to be a counterfeit. The customer took the shoes to the nearest Nike outlet in Bengaluru and the company’s showroom certified the pair he got through Club Factory as fake. The customer then went to the police armed with this confirmation and filed an FIR. Apart from the Nike shoes, the customer had ordered Oakley sunglasses and hair oil also on Club Factory. These two also appear to be not original.
The complaint is now filed against Future India Private Limited, Jialun Li and Garvit Aggarwal. These two are the directors of the company.
Police investigators are understood to have asked the respective companies to file separate cases for violation of the Copyright Act as well. The fact is this case of counterfeit articles being sold online through ecommerce platforms is not new. Indian ecommerce sites like Amazon and Flipkart too face this issue from time to time. The marketplaces try and escape responsibility by blaming the unscrupulous sellers on their sites. The authorities are not very convinced with this explanation and hold the marketplace operators responsible for the goods being displayed on their platform.
Most recently, Amazon and Flipkart have introduced more measures at identifying such sellers and stripping them off the sites. But the sellers find ingenious ways of sneaking in.
At some level, the customers are also to be blamed. A pair of Nike shoes being sold in the market for say ₹4,000 cannot possibly be sold for just ₹700 or ₹800.
A study has revealed that categories like cosmetics, watches, perfumes and footwear are clearly the most frequently observed ones to have fake products being sold. The trouble comes for a site like Club Factory when it gives a stamp “CF Verified” against a product which is fake. At least in these cases, there is no way Club Factory can escape being prosecuted.