Guides
How to find, evidence and take down stores impersonating your brand. Procedural guides on Shopify notices, registrars, Safe Browsing and payment processors.
How AI Agents Send Your Customers to Fake Stores
One case followed from start to finish: a shopper asks an AI agent for a branded product, picks a lookalike listing, lands on a copycat store and pays at a checkout that is not on Shopify. Only 4 of 18 recommendations were the brand's own site.
AI search
We Asked AI Shopping Agents to Find 55 Shopify Brands 7,291 Times. 47% Got Impostors.
We ran 7,291 AI shopping searches for 55 Shopify brands across six markets. For 26 of them the AI also recommended impostor stores, and in 515 searches an impostor ranked above the official store.
Our data
Best Brand Protection Tools for Ecommerce in 2026
Nine brand protection platforms compared on detection, takedowns, human review, pricing and who signs the IP notice, then ranked for enterprise brands and for small Shopify stores, with a pick for each.
Brand protection
Is ChatGPT Recommending Fake Stores Instead of Your Brand?
AI assistants answer shopping questions by reading the open web, and the open web contains copies of your store. How to check what ChatGPT and Claude say about your brand, and what to do when they point to a fake.
AI search
UDRP vs URS: Which Domain Dispute Route to Pick
URS suspends a copycat domain fast and cheaply but does not give it to you. UDRP can transfer the domain, at a higher cost and a longer wait. A plain-English decision table on cost, speed and outcome, with honest fees.
Domain disputes
How to Take Down a Fake Website Impersonating Your Brand
A website is copying your brand and taking your orders. The ordered routes to get it offline, from the free no-signature reports (Safe Browsing, host, registrar, CDN, payment processor) to the sworn routes (DMCA, then URS or UDRP), with honest costs.
Takedowns
How to Find Fake Copies of Your Website (Free 5-Minute Check)
Find fake copies of your website for free in about five minutes. Reverse image search your product photos, exact-phrase search your product copy, check the Meta Ad Library, and look for lookalike domains, then automate the whole sweep.
Detection
DMCA Takedown for a Copied Store: Step by Step With Template
A DMCA takedown is a free notice you send to a copied store's host or platform to remove your photos, text or layout. A step by step walkthrough, where to send it on Shopify, and a copy-paste template you fill in and file yourself.
Takedowns
Bustem vs Katcher vs Red Points: Shopify Brand Protection Compared
A fair, three-way comparison of Bustem, Katcher and Red Points for Shopify brand protection, verified October 2026: who each is built for, what each closes, pricing, AI-assistant monitoring and takedown track record.
Brand protection
Red Points Alternatives for Small and Mid-Size Brands
Enterprise brand protection like Red Points is priced for enterprise budgets and does not publish a number. Accessible alternatives for small and mid-size brands, with verified October 2026 pricing: Katcher, Brand Protector, nebty, Bustem and DMCA.com.
Brand protection
Takedown cost calculator: 1 to 100 a month
Two companies in this category publish a takedown price. Here is what each one costs at every volume from one store a month to a hundred.
Pricing
Shopify brand protection apps: what they can do
Searching the App Store for brand protection returns content protection tools. They solve a different problem from the one you have, and the reason is architectural rather than a question of quality.
Comparison
Brand protection pricing: who publishes a price
Checked on 16 September 2026: one vendor has no pricing page at all, another has one with no numbers on it. For a brand under a few million in revenue, an unpublished price is usually a signal about who the product is built for.
Comparison
How Scammers Clone Shopify Stores (and How to Catch Them in the First Week)
Copies of a store are not improvised. The same sequence shows up again and again, and knowing it tells you where the short window to catch one actually is.
Our data
We scanned 25 DTC brands for clones
A production run against 25 brands on the live internet. The headline is not that we found copies. It is that only three of twenty-five came back clean, and that most of what a scan turns up is noise that has to be removed before a person sees it.
Our data
What to tell customers who bought from a fake
Someone paid a scammer believing it was you, and they are angry at you. Here is what to send, what to avoid, and why the wording of the first reply decides whether you keep them.
Prevention
Make your store harder to clone: what works
Most advice in this area protects nobody. Here is what genuinely raises the cost of copying your store, what helps a little, and what is pure theater.
Prevention
Registrar abuse reports that actually get a response
A registrar report is not a takedown request, and treating it as one is why most of them go nowhere. Here is what registrars are actually obliged to do, and how to write a report they can act on.
Method
How to check if a Shopify store is real
You do not need tools or an account. Four public checks, five minutes, and most fake stores fail at least two of them.
Check it
TikTok Shop counterfeit report: why the seller stays online
Most brands report the video and wonder why the seller is still trading. The seller listing and the content that promotes it go through different processes, and a copy usually needs both.
Act now
Fake Facebook and Instagram Ads Using Your Brand: Find and Remove Them
A copy of your store usually hides from search and lives entirely on paid social. The Ad Library shows you what is running, and Meta's intellectual property route is separate from the ordinary report button.
Act now
Report a copycat store to its payment processor
Everyone reports the host and the registrar. Almost nobody reports the payment processor, which is the one party whose terms the store is definitely breaking and whose removal ends the economics immediately.
Act now
How to report a scam store to Google Safe Browsing
The fastest thing you can do about a fake store is not a legal notice. It is a safety report, because it describes what the page is doing rather than asserting who owns what, so nobody has to weigh a legal claim first.
Act now
Shopify DMCA takedown: wording that works
A notice is not persuasion, it is a checklist. It gets rejected when a required element is missing, when the URLs are vague, or when the complaint is really about something copyright does not cover.
Act now
How to report a fake Shopify store copying your brand
Shopify publishes its own intellectual property process and it costs nothing. What decides whether your report works is the evidence you attach and the one statement only the rights holder can make.
Act now
Typosquatting and Lookalike Domains: The Monitoring Guide
A permutation list finds the names you can imagine. Certificate transparency logs find the ones nobody would guess, because every site with HTTPS has to announce itself publicly first.
Method
Someone Copied My Shopify Store: What to Do in the First 24 Hours
Capture evidence before you touch anything. Then run the routes that need no signature from you, and only then the ones that do. Here is the order, and why it is that order.
Act now