Counterfeit and gray market goods account for roughly 467 billion dollars in global trade every year, close to 2.3 percent of everything bought and sold on the planet, according to research from the OECD and EUIPO. That figure spans everything from shipping containers to street stalls, but a growing share of it moves through the same four marketplaces where your own products are already listed: Amazon, Walmart, Target Plus, and Best Buy.
None of these four run the same way. They sell the same products, sometimes to the same customer, sometimes on the same afternoon, but each one was built by a different company with a different answer to three questions: who gets to sell, how fast does a violation get noticed, and how much leverage does the brand actually have once it finds one.
The closest comparison is four towns in the same country. Same currency, same general laws, four very different sheriffs. Here’s what actually works in each one.
Amazon: the town everyone thinks they already know
Unauthorized sellers are still the single biggest source of MAP violations on Amazon, which is exactly why they’re the seller type brands watch closest. What surprises most teams is who shows up right behind them. In our Q2 2026 analysis of 317,533 Amazon offers across 158 brands, authorized sellers violated MAP at almost the same rate as unauthorized ones, and Amazon itself, selling first-party, had the highest individual violation rate of any group. A signed agreement doesn’t guarantee compliance on its own.
That’s why we treat authorized and unauthorized sellers as two different problems requiring two different responses. Unauthorized sellers get direct pressure: investigation, cease and desist, escalation to takedown. Authorized sellers get something closer to account management: a documented violation, a graduated consequence, and a paper trail that holds up if the relationship needs to end. Confusing the two, or handling both the same way, is how good-faith partners start feeling punished and bad actors keep operating.
Walmart: fast to break, fast to fix if you’re watching
Walmart looks a lot like Amazon on the surface. It’s an open marketplace, third-party sellers sign up with relatively few barriers, and repricing software creates the same kind of spiral: one seller drops below MAP, others follow within hours, and a single violation turns into a category-wide problem fast.
The advantage brands don’t use enough is that Walmart sellers are usually identifiable and reachable directly, which means a notice sent the same day a violation is caught can actually land before the price war spreads. Speed is the entire game here. A violation that sits unaddressed for a week has usually already pulled three or four other sellers down with it. Every solid Walmart strategy comes down to the same three moves in order: define the policy clearly, monitor continuously, then enforce consistently. Skip the middle step and the other two don’t hold.
Our full Walmart brand protection guide →
Target Plus: the gated community with a back door
Target Plus runs on an invite-only model. Sellers are vetted before they’re allowed in, their identities are visible, and most are established businesses with a reputation to protect rather than anonymous accounts behind a repricing bot. That structure changes what enforcement should look like: less investigation, more direct, well-documented outreach. A clear notice, evidence attached, a deadline. Most sellers comply at that stage, because they have something real to lose if they don’t, which makes Target Plus one of the highest resolution rates we see across any marketplace once a violation is actually flagged.
The detail worth knowing is that Amazon’s Vendor Central sometimes price-matches Target Plus listings. A violation that starts quietly on Target Plus can show up as a price drop on Amazon within hours, so catching it on Target Plus first is what keeps it from becoming a two-marketplace fire instead of one.
The full Target Plus breakdown →
How Target handles unauthorized resellers specifically →
Best Buy: worth a closer look before you assume it’s fine
Best Buy’s marketplace used to be narrow, mostly electronics, mostly predictable. That’s changing as it expands into categories it never used to carry: home goods, toys, general merchandise. Vetting hasn’t caught up to that pace yet, which means the assumption “Best Buy is a controlled channel” is worth re-checking, especially outside your core category.
This is where a seller investigation earns its keep before a cease and desist does. Contact information is usually available, so once a seller is confirmed unauthorized, outreach tends to work well. The step brands skip is confirming who the seller actually is first, since a newer, looser marketplace is exactly where accounts get mislabeled as authorized when they aren’t.
The full Best Buy enforcement guide →
How to stop unauthorized sellers there →
Why the gap between marketplaces is the actual risk
WIPO handled over 6,282 domain name disputes in 2025, up from roughly 4,200 five years earlier. That’s one narrow slice of brand infringement, just domain squatting, and it’s still climbing. Pull that thread across marketplaces and the pattern holds: the problem isn’t shrinking anywhere, it’s just moving to wherever nobody’s looking that week.
The brands with the least exposure aren’t the ones fighting hardest on one platform. They’re the ones running the right play on each one: fast notices on Walmart, documented escalation on Target Plus, seller verification before enforcement on Best Buy, and separate tracks for authorized versus unauthorized sellers everywhere, especially Amazon.
If your products are live on more than one of these four and you’re only watching one of them closely, the other three aren’t quiet. They’re just unwatched.
Want to see where your brand actually stands across these marketplaces? Our team can walk you through it.
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