Your Factory Is Selling Your Product — What Is Actually Actionable
Someone sends you a link. It is your product, your packaging, and a price you cannot match.
Bolang Solutions is a trading company. We chose the model on purpose: it lets us buy across many factories instead of selling you one production line, inspect goods we don't manufacture, and put our own name on every export document as seller of record. The industry's trading-company horror stories are concealment stories — so we run the opposite playbook: registered scope public, address public, and a standing invitation to verify us on gsxt.gov.cn the same way we verify suppliers.
On shipments we trade, the commercial invoice, packing list and bill of lading carry Bolang as seller of record. One counterparty, legally on the hook, answering in English.
Verify us the way we verify suppliers — our registered name, address and Unified Social Credit Code are published on this site; look us up on gsxt.gov.cn.
This is the complaint we hear with the most anger behind it and the least paperwork under it. What you can do about it is decided almost entirely by decisions taken before the first order — which is unwelcome news if you are reading this afterwards, and the reason to read it beforehand.
This is not legal advice. We are a sourcing and trading company, not a law firm. Everything below is what we see go wrong commercially; the instrument itself should be drafted by a lawyer qualified in China.
First, establish what you actually own
“My design” is a description, not a right. Rights are specific and jurisdictional: a registered design or patent protects the appearance or function, a trademark protects the name and logo, copyright can cover artwork and packaging. Each is registered separately, each is registered per country, and a right registered only in your home market does very little about a factory in Guangdong selling to a buyer in Poland.
China operates first-to-file on trademarks. The person who registers the mark generally holds it, whether or not they invented it and whether or not you have been selling under it for years elsewhere. Discovering this after a supplier has registered your own brand name is a well-worn and thoroughly miserable path.
What is worth doing, in order
1 · Establish the listing is what you think it is. Identical photographs are strong evidence of copying; a similar product is often just a similar product, and the category may have looked like this before you entered it.
2 · Check whether the seller is your factory. Frequently it is not — it is a trading company reselling, sometimes without knowing the design is contested. That changes who you are actually in dispute with.
3 · Use the platform route if you have a registration. Marketplaces have IP complaint mechanisms and they work reasonably well when you can attach a registration number. Without one, a complaint is an assertion and is treated as one.
4 · Read your own contract. If there is a non-use clause with a stated damages figure, this is the moment it earns its cost. If there is only an NDA, see why that is the wrong instrument.
The uncomfortable answer, said plainly
If you registered nothing in China, signed nothing beyond a purchase order, and the product is not distinctive enough to be an obvious copy, your realistic options are commercial rather than legal: compete, differentiate, or move. We would rather say that than sell you a project with no achievable outcome.
The thing that actually works is preventative and cheap by comparison: register the trademark in China before production starts, not after the first reorder. It is the one step in this page that reliably changes what happens next.
Common questions
Withholding payment on a delivered order is a separate dispute that the factory will win on its own terms, and it does not address the listing. Take advice before using money you owe as leverage on a claim you have not established.
It protects the logo, which is worth having — a copy without your branding is a weaker competitor. It does nothing about the shape, the mechanism or the packaging unless those are separately registered.
If we see it, yes, and we would tell you even where it is awkward. But we do not run marketplace monitoring as a service and we will not imply a level of surveillance we do not perform.
Related
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