"Dealing with counterfeiters used to take up a large part of my day and high attorney fees," stated Aaron Muller, CEO of ChomChom Roller, the number-one-selling pet hair remover on Amazon with over 6,300 reviews. "We would sell a very healthy volume of ChomChom Rollers a day, and all of a sudden our sales would drop to zero. A counterfeit seller had shipped its products to Amazon's warehouses claiming to be ChomChom Rollers, priced them at a price much cheaper than ours, and won the Buy Box. When customers clicked the 'Add to Cart' button on ChomChom Roller's product page, they were actually buying fake ChomChom Rollers from counterfeit sellers shipped from Amazon's warehouses."
"We thought being part of Project Zero would solve our counterfeit problem, but the counterfeiters became more creative," explained Muller. "Instead of pretending to sell an authentic ChomChom Roller, counterfeiters would rip off our utility patent, call their rollers by a different name, and sell their rollers on Amazon. The more success we had, the more counterfeiters appeared. Fighting all the patent infringements became extremely expensive and time-consuming."
Muller was relieved to join Amazon's Utility Patent Neutral Evaluation program in 2019. The program is still in its beta phase, but it provides utility patent owners a timely and inexpensive avenue to get counterfeit listings removed. To date, ChomChom Rollers has worked with Amazon to remove over 320 counterfeit listings.
"As a small business, we don't have a big legal fees budget," said Muller. "Removing all the listings that infringe on our patent has allowed our product to reach number one in Cat Hair Removal Product and Dog Hair Removal Product on Amazon, and occasionally reach number one in all of Pet Supplies on Amazon. We appreciate Amazon's support of small businesses and its commitment to the integrity of its marketplace. Without Project Zero and the Utility Patent Neutral Evaluation program, we would not have achieved the level of success we did."