Earning $140,000 a day, the huge profits and abyss behind "Changyuan"

Wireless earphones are gradually replacing wired earphones due to their portability and aesthetics. Especially for office workers, it is very easy to lose wired earphones in crowded places during commuting, and the emergence of wireless earphones frees consumers from the limitations of wired earphones.

In the wireless earphone market, Airpods is one of the best. Its popularity is only increasing, and there are always people who want to get a piece of the pie, so many copycat products have appeared on the market.

But recently, a type of wireless headset that claims to be "factory original" has concealed its true identity as a copycat. It has been sold on major e-commerce platforms after changing its "shell", and under the banner of "original product from the same factory, same quality", it has unscrupulously disrupted the entire market.

So how much profit is this kind of "factory original"? Take Airpods as an example. Bloomberg recently quoted a report from the data agency Ghost Data team and gave a relatively clear data. A seller who sold factory original AirPods products on Instagram made $140,000 in one day .

But this is just the tip of the iceberg of the counterfeit market. The profits behind it are far beyond our imagination.

“ Factory original ” is hot on Instagram, sellers earn $140,000 a day

According to the survey data of Ghost Data team , counterfeit AirPods are hot-selling on social media such as Instagram and Twitter . Sellers generally have multiple accounts on the platform and expand the scope of counterfeit sales by covering audiences of different ages and categories.

These sellers call the fake AirPods Apple's original products and offer lower prices than genuine products to attract consumers . The appearance is almost identical, but the price is more than ten times different, which is hard not to attract consumers.

The price of genuine AirPods Pro on Apple's official website is $249, but you can buy a pair on Instagram for only $25 .

Moreover, the speed at which these counterfeit sellers update and replace their products is almost synchronized with that of genuine products. Whenever a new product is launched, within a few days, a large number of sellers can be found on the platform starting to sell original factory products.

The MagSafe charger sold on Apple's official website costs $39, while the copycat version only costs $5.5.

Ghost Data monitored 163 counterfeit Apple product dealers on Instagram from February 8 to March 8. One of the merchants made $140,000 in just one day. This was only the income from remittances through HSBC Bank, not including the credit card part.

The study also pointed out that counterfeit sellers uploaded more than 50,000 posts last year and received about 600,000 likes and comments.

No matter how authentic these sellers claim to be, products labeled as "factory original" are just packaged counterfeits.

High profits are accompanied by high risks. In addition to infringing on the patents of the original products and being easily sued for infringement during the sales process, copycat products also have another potential risk - poor quality.

There are endless cases of counterfeit products exploding while being used by consumers , and some have even caused death .

However, since it is often more difficult to hold people accountable on social media platforms than in the real world, and merchants' after-sales service and reputation cannot be guaranteed, for platforms like Instagram, counterfeit sellers are a cancer that will reduce consumers' trust in the platform and damage the platform's commercial development.

Sellers sell products on social media such as Instagram because, on the one hand, social media has a large amount of traffic , and social media is less strict on the sale of counterfeit goods than platforms such as Amazon and Wish . At the same time, the huge profits of $140,000 a day also drive some people to sell counterfeit goods at all costs in order to "make a quick buck . "

However, often because they only focus on the immediate interests and try to test the edge of the law, they will eventually be punished more than the interests. Some time ago, Wish launched a policy to crack down on "factory-origin" products. The editor saw a seller in a communication group complaining: "The platform didn't tell you earlier that there is such a way to make money. Sellers have made hundreds of thousands of dollars."

But after a while, some buyers said that those sellers who sold factory originals had been arrested .

Now, major e-commerce platforms are increasingly cracking down on counterfeit and factory-original products, and the effect is obvious. However, social platforms are still flooded with fakes. Despite warnings that many sellers have been sued or arrested, some sellers still invest in this "black ocean" regardless of everything .

But if you want to make money in business, you need to take a long-term view. Money earned within the legal scope is safer and more profitable.

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