Collecting the sellers of products sold under a brand name without permission
To support a public cultural foundation's copyright and trademark protection work, we automatically collected the sellers of products sold in online shopping malls under the foundation's brand name. It counts by seller, not by product.
Sellers identified
Before
Checking search results one by one
After
Automatic collection across all pages
Background
The cultural products the foundation makes carry a brand. And products sold under that brand name without official permission get listed in online shopping malls. Protecting copyright and trademark starts with knowing where they are being sold.
What we saw on the ground
Mall search results are split across pages, and the same seller keeps appearing repeatedly under different products. When a person scans them by eye, the later pages get missed, and sellers already checked earlier get checked again. The quality of the check depends on how many pages the search results span.
The problem we defined
What needed to be found was the seller, not the product. Counting by product catches the same place multiple times, so how many places actually require action cannot be known. Changing the counting unit was the core of this work.
What we built
- Walk all result pages — search by brand name and go page by page, 40 items per page, all the way to the end
- Product-name matching — keep only products whose name actually contains the brand name
- Deduplication by seller — the same seller is recorded only once. The number of targets for action is exactly the number of sellers
- Excel export — the product name, seller address, and position within the search results are kept together so they can be revisited
What we guarded against
- Pace yourself between pages — each page turn waits a random amount of time. Not hammering the site is the way to keep reaching the later pages without getting cut off
- Go all the way to the end — in the search results, spots that are not official sellers are packed toward the back, not the front. Seeing only the first few pages means missing what you were supposed to find
- Duplicates are filtered by seller — even if one place posts ten products, only one record remains. The number of targets for action does not get inflated
Result
The commissioned scope was completed and delivered.
Other work made the same way is gathered at web data collection.
Sources
The collection script