The main SaaS website building platforms include shopify, bigcommerce, shopmaker, shopyy, ueeshop, etc.
Of course not! The reason is simple. It is not feasible to use SaaS to build websites for counterfeit brands.
From a technical perspective, the SaaS website building platform lacks the following aspects:
①. Payment technology: As we all know, in the industry, in addition to the COD model, the online payment methods that can be used now mainly include overseas credit card channels, PayPal, Stripe, Square and other technologies, as shown in the following figure:
1) For most people, credit card channels are a luxury, and the payment success rate will not exceed 20%. Credit card channels are a thing of the past, forget about it! Only a very small number of powerful customers have channels abroad and use overseas channels. This is a bonus for a few people.
2) Paypal/Stripe/Square solutions are more commonly used on the market. SaaS advocates offline transfers, or even Western Union. Offline transfers/Western Union/MoneyGram, etc. This payment method is based on the fact that the buyer has great trust in you (including product quality, service quality, after-sales, compensation, etc.); for new buyers who have never cooperated with you for one or two times, this matter can be understood like this: the buyer transfers the money directly to you without any guarantee (you can ship the goods or not, the money has been received anyway), and the acceptance level can be imagined.
3) Intermediate station jump: According to feedback from some customers, some SaaS website building platforms mentioned the term “intermediate station” in previous investment promotion. The so-called “intermediate station” is actually just a jump. You can simply understand it this way. Put knock off products on one station, and when paying, jump to another station. It seems that the solution is feasible, but in fact, this is already a very backward technology. Technology does not matter whether it is new or old, the key is feasibility. Is the intermediate station feasible? The answer is no! Because when you jump, the payment environment itself has changed, especially when the flow of water increases, PayPal or Stripe’s crawlers can detect it and immediately trace it back to your source station. Your product data is clear at a glance in front of the crawler, and then the account is blocked and the funds are frozen, which does not solve the problem at all.
Although some SaaS platforms mentioned the link of intermediate station jump when promoting their websites, in fact, many of them are just SaaS model platform sites, and there is no intermediate station at all. In terms of counterfeit brand payment, it is equivalent to “running naked”, and the result can be imagined.
In fact, when using the paypal/stripe/square solution, the big framework is AB+ server, which is not a problem, but it is necessary to do a good job of avoiding crawlers, such as IP header judgment, SPY detection avoidance, IP environment changes, entry replacement, etc. For example, when the IP environment changes, the security station replacement must be done, as shown in the following figure:
Before clicking “PAY NOW”, you can simulate the behavior of a crawler by hanging a wall, switching the IP, and doing cloak security page processing.
The same principle applies to entry replacement, which means that all crawlers from PayPal/Stripe/Cube must be cloaked, so a simple jump cannot solve any problems at all, let alone handle large transactions.
4) Account resources: For some customers with large order volumes (for example, 100,000 USD per day), a single account is obviously not enough. Generally, multiple accounts are required. If a single account receives too much payment, it will trigger manual review. This has nothing to do with whether your product is a counterfeit. Even if it is a common product, if you receive too much payment at once, the payee will definitely review your payment (for example, whether it involves money laundering, etc.). This is normal risk control. For this type of review, the two things we can do in the counterfeit industry are to try to provide valid bills and certificates (there are methods) and avoid review. Both points are very important. After all, review is not a good thing!
Therefore, for customers with “large order volumes”, it is crucial to configure polling rules according to different weights while avoiding crawlers, and use different gateways to pay, as shown below:
Polling system:
The polling system not only supports payments through different gateways, but also supports identification of suspicious fraud orders, reminders of high-incidence phishing areas (GBC, etc.), switching of payment, and payment collection in different time periods.
When using an account, it is generally recommended to use overseas account channels, which are much more stable and secure than those in the mainland. For example: US PayPal (US Bank/SSN), Stripe, Hong Kong accounts, etc. The cost is very low, and you can get an account for a few US dollars, but the prerequisite is to have a channel!
5) The acquiring industry is a mixed bag. Even if the channel is reliable, at least 30 points of turnover will be charged (equivalent to 60 points of profit), which is not cost-effective. It is just an intermediate jump settlement management website.
②. Cloak technology: Although cloak does not belong to the service scope of counterfeit brand service providers, the selection, channels, and optimization of the use of cloaks reflect a service provider’s service capabilities for the counterfeit brand industry. Like Shopify’s original intention, many SaaS platforms focused on general goods SaaS services in the early days and did not delve into the replica brand industry. This can be reflected in the cloak link. According to customer feedback, before the service starts, some SaaS platforms will also recommend some domestic cloaks, which is actually very unprofessional and superficial. In the imitation brand or Black Friday industry, it can be said that sellers on the track will not choose domestic cloaks (except for newbies). You know the reason. In the industry, the truly awesome cloaks are actually the two or three foreign ones, and these cloaks cannot be opened whenever you want. You must have a network alliance recommendation channel to open them. In addition, they are very skillful in use. For example, the choice of security personnel determines how long your big black account can survive, as shown in the following figure:
Many mid-level cloak players only set up the Disallowed Visitors security page “roughly”, such as grabbing an Amazon or Shopify link. This can indeed solve the problem of “passing the review in seconds”, but there is also the problem of “survival time”!
The use of cloaks should be “moderate”, especially the setting of filtering rules. If the setting is too strict, it will lead to a large number of false positives of real buyers. If the setting is too loose, it will cause crawlers to leak in and directly hang a big black account, as shown in the following figure:
Therefore, cloak is a double-edged sword. If you don’t use the cloak properly, your account will be banned forever!
SaaS platforms don’t understand these, and they don’t have any related one-stop technical service solutions and channels.
③. Updates to fake brand technology: The feasibility of all technologies is based on a high degree of proficiency in the industry. In other words, without working in the counterfeit brand industry for a few years, how can you provide continuous and effective technical solutions and services? For example, when the paypal/stripe/square crawler rules change, are your payment avoidance methods and entry replacement algorithms updated in a timely manner? Facebook often upgrades its algorithms. Are your advertising compatibility, in-site cloak response strategies, and IP libraries updated? These are all very important! Especially in industries like counterfeit brands and Black Friday, which change too fast, it is definitely not possible without a technical team that can keep up with the pace. There will be too many problems, such as collecting payments well, but suddenly being frozen and unable to collect payments.
Therefore, to sum up the above three points, from a technical perspective, in the replica brand industry, the SaaS platform is not feasible. Although they emphasize “products are not reviewed”, it is of no use. In other words, when doing counterfeit brand business on an independent site, there is no such thing as “product review”. They are all independent websites, and they set their own rules. It is not a platform!
Below is a brief description of the difficulty in various scenarios based on the scenarios where replica brands appear:
① Large cross-border e-commerce platforms: Amazon, AliExpress, eBay, Dunhuang.com, etc. In the post-cross-border e-commerce era, these platforms basically take a “rat crossing the street, everyone shouts and beats” attitude towards counterfeit brand products (even if DHgate allows counterfeit brand products by default, it is useless, just to earn entry fees, and there is basically no traffic). In other words, counterfeit brand products have almost no room for survival on such platforms! Perhaps, there are still some such sellers hidden on the platform, using hints, secretly doing, skirting the rules, weekend stores, P-ing out logos and other methods to carry out knockoff brand business, but most of them are “ill-fated”. Even if a certain link is ranked up, the next thing to face is delisting, punishment, or even fund freezing, and the end of losing all the money. The risk is extremely high and the difficulty is too great, so it is not recommended! We also have many such customers who have also transferred from these platforms, and more than 99% of them ended in failure (businesses that do not make money in the end are failed businesses), and the stores will not survive for too long.
Difficulty level: ★★★★★
②, Open source independent station model: adopt open source system secondary development, such as Opencart, WordPress + Woocommerce, Magento and other common systems, which is more appropriate, at least it is absolutely feasible on the technical level, which is also the biggest difference from the SaaS model. Most people who know the business will adopt this method to carry out imitation business.
The difficulty of this model lies in the promotion and operation of traffic, because the independent station itself is different from the platform, and all traffic must be attracted by oneself. 911S5 / Luminati + Adspower (fingerprint browser) + Cloak + Dahei, this method is a conventional method. It can be said that for those who have done counterfeit or even those who have not done counterfeit, a little training and learning will understand, and it is not as difficult as imagined.
Of course, advertising is only one of the traffic methods. In the era of diversified traffic, there are actually many ways to attract traffic, such as:
1) Live streaming traffic has the highest conversion rate, but the problem of maintaining accounts needs to be solved.
2) Internet celebrities/group owners: Generally, they adopt the affiliate marketing commission model, which is similar to the “affiliate marketing” function of AliExpress. They track the traffic orders of the Internet celebrities or group owners’ Pin posts throughout the process. Such Internet celebrities or group owners use special tools to screen and judge. In fact, they are easy to find (people who don’t understand the industry will find it difficult to find), which is mutually beneficial and win-win. Many celebrities are willing to do it, but the quality is uneven and needs to be strictly controlled.
Difficulty: ★★★
③. Chat mode: These modes mainly rely on SNS social platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook Group, Tik Tok, and Pinterest, to lead customers to photo albums or directly to WhatsApp for selection, quotation, payment method, etc., without the need for an independent website. However, this mode has trust issues, extremely low conversion rate, and extremely low efficiency. The scale that can be achieved can be imagined. Many sellers cannot tolerate high bounce rate and low conversion rate, and are forced to transform to an independent website.
④. SEO: Search engine optimization is a long-term and tough task, especially with the ban on the counterfeit brand industry by giants such as Google and Bing. SEO traffic often needs to be expanded through blog groups and other means to generate secondary and private domain traffic. In short, this is a protracted war that requires manpower, material resources, and financial resources. Only when it is widely used can quantitative changes lead to qualitative changes (the effect cannot be seen in a year or two).
Difficulty level: ★★★★★
There are too many individuals, studios or companies in the market that claim to be able to provide replica brand services, but in fact, there are good and bad companies. This is what I think. You must pay attention to the following points:
①. Qualifications: Forget about individuals or studios. The replicas industry changes too fast, and there are too many things that need to be maintained and upgraded. It is impossible without a stable development team.
②. Whether the service is relevant: confirm whether the team started out as a replica brand, including some on-site cases. Any website building company can build a website, but without specificity and availability, it is hard to imagine how a company that did not start out as a counterfeit brand or Black Friday can provide reliable services? For example, SaaS platforms such as Shopyy, Ueeshop, Shopify, etc., because they have no accumulation in the imitation brand industry, are not familiar with the various industry rules, changes, and routines of counterfeit brands. They are not well versed in this industry, let alone being able to provide technical services in this industry. Especially in industries like counterfeit brands and Black Friday, the rules and gameplay change three times a day. For example, once the Facebook algorithm changes, the gameplay must be upgraded synchronously. Therefore, it is hard to imagine how a service company that is not well versed in an industry can play in this industry? It can be said that the counterfeit brand industry has not accumulated for five to eight years and cannot provide upstream integrated solution services;
③. Whether the service is complete: The complete links involved in the replica brand and Black Friday industry should include: counterfeit brand website building, counterfeit brand payment, cloak, in-depth course training incubation, black card, fishing, supply chain resources, international logistics solutions, number source channels, big data, etc., rather than just the common universal template website building services on the market that “build a replica brand technology is not complete”.
The above only demonstrates the solutions of this industry from the perspectives of technology, feasibility, industry background, etc., for reference only.
