Hair SyrupAn entrepreneur has said several accounts listed fake versions of her haircare products on e-commerce platform TikTok Shop.
Lucie Macleod, 25, who grew up in Pembrokeshire, is the owner and founder of haircare company Hair Syrup and said she was making “millions of pounds” through the platform.
City of London Trading Standards – the regional team with the power to investigate TikTok – said it had “serious concerns about TikTok Shop regarding the sale of a range of unsafe products advertised on this platform”.
TikTok Shop has been asked to comment.
Ms Macleod said her company, which is based in Goodwick, had nearly half of its revenue from TikTok Shop last year, but that has dropped to a quarter this year after other accounts started selling knock-off versions of her hair oils, prompting complaints from customers.
“It’s a huge platform for us and it makes us millions of pounds every year. So it’s not good when we have problems with it,” she said.
She said the process of being able to sell on the site was far too easy: “The people selling it just have to provide a letter, essentially a forged letter of approval, that’s all that was required of them.
“We were having so many complaints off people. People were making social media posts saying they would never buy from us again.
“And when we would look into these, we’d reply to these people and say ‘sorry, but that’s not even our product’, but the damage had been done.”
Hair SyrupMs Macleod was able to get TikTok Shop to remove the fake products and the accounts, but said: “At the beginning, the processes of getting these fakes taken down, the hoops that we were being made to jump through, the paperwork, it was all just quite frankly ridiculous to prove that this wasn’t us.”
Ms Macleod now sells her products on an alternative cosmetic retailer site and believes there will be a shift in consumer purchasing habits after the problems on TikTok Shop.
“We’ve been redirecting people because they know that they are the actual authentic products,” she said.
“I think there’s always going to be a space for TikTok Shop, but I do see us moving now more back towards that traditional e-retailer.”
Phil Lewis, director general of the Anti-Counterfeiting Group (ACG) which represents brands, said buyers need to be “aware of the threats from evermore dangerous counterfeits”.
“We have witnessed counterfeiters using toxic ingredients that they have blended in industrial machines such as cement mixers.”
He said while organised criminal counterfeiters were “highly adept at evading existing platforms and systems”, the ACG was “working hard with e-commerce platforms to build more pre-emptive systems and algorithms to identify suspect sellers, to safeguard consumers and prevent the abuse and infiltration of legitimate businesses”.
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