Chris Keef talks about Ecom Mastery Ai featuring BDSS is Nashville

The biggest scariest part was this person invented a product. She had a great she did all the all the the correct things. Spent about 400 grand of her own dollars. Utility patent, a design patent, trademarks, did it all correct. Got it launched in the US. Went viral. Sold through her first $2,500 batch. So excited. Awesome. We're off to the bank. She had $152 knockoffs. We ended up having to go to court. took the people to court and 152 sellers, 15,212 units sold out from under representing $444,000 in lost revenue. Her product was dead. Her idea, her patent, you had those sellers come, unfortunately, a lot of them Chinese sellers that show up and say, "I'm just going to take this idea and, you know, come after me." Well, okay. Went after him. >> Hey Chris, how you doing? >> Amy, I'm doing well. Thank you very much. Well, awesome. I'm calling you because, as you know, I'm part of this upcoming event that you're speaking at, ecommastery.ai. And this is such an incredible event. We're doing e-commerce merging with everything AI, all the e-commerce channels, all the latest and greatest in AI. And you're going to be there talking about brand protection strategies to fight hijackers and counterfeiters. So, how excited are you about this event? >> Uh, quite excited. AI is obviously fantastic for lots of reasons, but I think in all fairness, it might make it too easy for some sellers where I think there's kind of a barrier to entry, uh maybe language things or other things like that. Now, it's getting easier. So, that leads a lot to what I'll be talking about, but I can give you some numbers in a couple minute that minutes that are pretty interesting. So, I think it's great news for a lot of sellers, kind of challenging for others, but there's ways to counteract that, and that's that's what I want to talk about. >> Yeah. Yeah. And you know what's great about this event is we're going to have everyone from beginners, people maybe wanting to get into e-commerce all the way to multi-million dollar sellers. And all of us need to understand these nuances. Not only the basics that e-commerce sellers needed to understand before, but also if you're getting into this business, you need to understand what it looks like now. And that's why this event exists. Because if we take a course from even a few months ago, yeah, >> it's not going to be the same. It's really incredible that we get this opportunity to come together and have this kind of mind meld meeting of the minds and networking and just understanding what we should be doing now so that we can not only survive but thrive in this. So Chris, hijackers and counterfeiters are a nightmare for sellers and what's the scariest case you've seen and how much revenue did that seller lose before they fixed it? Yeah. Uh, in context to that, just just to note that real quickly, numbers of new registrations on Amazon last year, 62.3% were from China. So, that's a big number. Now, that's not inherently bad. I have no anti-Chinese sentiment, but I think a lot of us that work with suppliers of folks from China, sometimes they have a sliding scale of um, kind of how to do business. And when it comes to Amazon, having that literal geographic reach, that's difficult. So, what we found in cases that we worked with, we've some found some pretty big and scary cases of people that had their patents knocked off, uh, image stacks, full-on just ripoff of a product from design patent to utility patent, and it's it's difficult. I'm going to share with you. I've got two real big ones. Yeah, I'm going to do a little bit of a teaser. We have a massive one I'll share share at the event, but this one, the second one, it's a a case that the biggest scariest part was this person invented a product. She had a great she did all the all the the correct things. Spent about 400 grand of her own dollars, a utility patent, a design patent, trademarks, did it all correct. Got it launched in the US, went viral, sold through her first $2,500 batch. So excited. Awesome. We're off to the bank. Next order comes in before it lands stateside. She had 152 knockoffs. We ended up having to go to court. took the people to court and 152 sellers, 15,212 units sold out from under her representing $444,000 in lost revenue. Her product was dead. 152 sellers. So her idea, her patent, you had those sellers come, unfortunately, a lot of them Chinese sellers that show up and say, "I'm just going to take this idea and, you know, come after me." Well, okay. Went after him. So that's a big scary one. That's that's alarming. Half a million dollars. that that that right there kind of shows the impact of what can go wrong if you don't if you don't kind of defend your position. >> And you know, so many speakers are going to be talking about what types of products to launch today since it's all becoming easier with AI. But then also that means that we need more of a moat around our business. And now the copycats are really bad compared to what they used to be. I invented a product, patented it, and as I was going through, I exited that business in 2024. But as I was going through my exit, someone copied me and turned out they weren't actually infringing on my patent, which was so scary. Luckily, the product that they made was so bad that it wasn't, you know, it wasn't going to survive long. And it all worked out. But now I'm seeing even with my clients, it's so many copycats, so much happening that before we used to be able to build more of a moat. So now more than ever, it's very very important to uh make sure that we understand how to develop really cool products, but more importantly, how to protect them. And what do you think, Chris, as far as the steps people should take in um avoiding copycats and IP theft? >> First thing you need to do is I didn't worry about this in 2012 when I started Amazon. I'm bit of an OG in the space, been around a long time. I didn't really worry about it and it was you could private label something. It was great. I mean sort of low barrier to entry and that was wonderful. But to your exact point that's now becoming an issue where people don't even think of inventing something they just say what's selling well I'm just going to go do that. So ahead of time things that you really need to get your arms around when you can get a utility patent get a design patent barring that if you don't want to spend the time money or dollars or can't trademark things copyright things get your image stack create people are so lazy this point to your point about AI right it's easy to say hey go scrape an image stack slap it up there those are you those are your images now they live on Amazon but you created them you got the time stamp it's your stuff you can't just rip those and use them again so trademark those get those things in place with your brand so you've got some sort of defense so you can go after it and say, "Okay, look, this is clearly a ripoff." Don't do that. Uh, language, uh, trademarks and copies help a whole bunch. Anything you can do in the front end to give yourself a little bit of ammo to fight those things. That's the best thing you can do ahead of time. And or talk to someone in the space because now it's kind of cost of doing a cost of doing business. Talk to someone that's good in the brand defense that they can say, "Hey, you can't protect against everything, but there's a couple tools in the toolbox you really need to have ahead of time to give yourself a fighting chance to make sure you can defend those things." >> Yeah, that makes sense. When it comes to this event, Ecommastery.ai, we're going to have everyone from beginners all the way to advanced multi-million dollar sellers at this event. And we need to be sure that we understand in this crazy AI age, how to not only protect our businesses, but start whether you're starting your business and coming up with those products, start with protection in mind and then grow with protection in mind as well. And most importantly, you brought up Chris about the network. This event, you're going to meet so many A players, people like Chris, like you um who can help you when you're in those situations. Your session in Nashville, it's going to arm sellers with protection strategies. What's the one thing every seller should implement before they even leave the conference? >> Tougher one given my what I'm talking about, but a good tool is talk to me. I think the big one is you're in the room, right? get to the room, get to the event and talk to people, talk to me, ask the questions, talk to other people around there. Or in that case, kind of what what I just mentioned a couple minutes ago, what look around and say, "Geez, what do I have for defendable IP? What do I have for trademarks? What do I have for copyrights?" And then take stock of that. If you got nothing, that's okay. A lot of people don't. That's fine. But really make a couple notes and say, "Okay, I really ought to get on that." And that's something on your to-do list you should do as soon as possible. You can defend yourself. It is fantastic as a brand newbie. You're going to learn a lot of things to say, I need to do this stuff now to get ahead of this. If you've been established for a number of years, I won't give I'll give the details in the speech. I won't tease it too much, but nine figures nine figures were sold of this brand. The impact was nine figures to their business. Now, the good news is there are different ways to attack problems that aren't just exclusively patents or copyrights or trademarks. There could be false advertising. You have a lot of claims being made on Amazon that are wildly wrong and demonstrabably false. So, those things can all be, you know, you can build cases around that. So there's a lot of things you can defend. So get to the room. I mean, this is this is one of those places where there are a lot of there are a lot of events, but this event is it resonates with me because of just like you said, there are some newbies there, but there are some really wellestablished people been around since 2012. I've seen a lot. I know you're an OG in the space as well. Get in the room and talk to the people that are able to deliver that have been delivering that the whole time in this space. Learn learn everything you can. And then from the the guys and gals that have been doing this for a very long time with tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars in sales. Fantastic. So talk to those folks. I mean, that's the best thing you can do. Or in my specific case, take stock of what you have and put a top of your list to say, man, I know this if it hasn't happened yet, it's going to happen to you sooner than later. So, get that stuff in place. >> I love that advice. Be in the room. There is nothing better. We can all watch recordings, but nothing replaces actually being there, talking to people, building our network, not being so alone in this business, and there is no better family and friends than the network that we have at Kevin King's event. So, we hope to see you all there. Um, Chris, it's been so great talking to you today. Uh, ecommastery.ai. And Chris has a coupon code. It is mastery. Use coupon code mastery to save 20% at ecommastery.ai. AI.