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Why is Plagiarism in Ecommerce an Issue?
Plagiarism is one of the biggest nightmares for the eCommerce industry. From eCommerce platform owners to industry experts, everyone hates it. But the question is, why is plagiarism an issue in the eCommerce world?
This article will briefly explain the consequences of plagiarism for eCommerce platforms. It will help you understand people’s hatred for plagiarism.
Consequences Of Plagiarism For Ecommerce Platforms
Here are discussed the consequences of plagiarism for ecommerce platformsl
Ruins Reputation
In the eCommerce world, reputation is everything. Brands need to maintain an excellent reputation for providing extraordinary services and upholding great brand values. A brand must have a positive reputation in the market to attract people and succeed in the business.
Multiple factors can impact a brand’s reputation. And plagiarism is one of them. No brand wants the label of plagiarist or copier. They know it can directly impact their reputation and may lose their customers’ trust. And once the reputation is damaged, it isn’t easy to recover from it.
Financial Loss
Plagiarism can also lead eCommerce stores to financial losses. For example, if a store copies others’ textual or visual content, the original content creator can sue the store owner and ask for financial compensation.
Laws related to plagiarism and intellectual theft are stringent, and courts mostly give verdicts in favour of affected parties. So, deliberate efforts to plagiarism can lead people to heavy penalties. That’s why eCommerce store owners should always avoid plagiarism.
Moreover, plagiarism can also impact sales. When people lose trust in a brand, they may not buy its products because they think it doesn’t uphold great values.
Legal Consequences
As already discussed, plagiarism instances can be hazardous for eCommerce stores as the original creators can sue the plagiarists. The legal authorities treat content copiers as thieves because they believe they stole others’ intellectual work. So, in most cases, they ask plagiarists to compensate the affected parties. Plus, they can also send plagiarists to jail.
There are many cases when courts have given verdicts against plagiarists without showing mercy. Even due to a plagiarism case, the former Prime Minister of Romania, Victor Ponta, has been removed from power. Similarly, there are many cases where courts decided against the plagiarists and punished them for their crimes.
Impact on Search Engine Rankings
Google and other search engines also hate plagiarism. They only respect original, authentic, and valuable content. That’s why you would have observed that most of Google’s core updates are related to content. And whenever an update comes, thousands of websites lose their rankings, and others gain it. This usually happens because of the content quality.
Plagiarism can even impact already-ranked websites. For example, if your website is ranked higher against multiple keywords and you start publishing plagiarized content, you will experience a significant drop in your rankings. The reason? Search engines, especially Google, rank only the websites providing high-quality and original content. A website must provide original and valuable content to users to rank higher and gratify users’ needs.
In short, plagiarism not only impacts the pages where plagiarized content is published but also affects the whole website.
Raise Quality Concerns
Plagiarism can also raise quality concerns. For example, plagiarized content usually lacks accuracy and depth, two of the most essential qualities for eCommerce websites. It may need to provide detailed insights into the products or services a company offers its customers.
Moreover, the content published on any other store is not curated for other brands. Although it is outstanding for one specific brand, it is inaccurate for other stores. For example, if two clothing stores are selling leather jackets. However, one sells formal jackets, and the other store sells funky jackets. The content for formal jackets needs to be more suitable for funky jackets. If someone copies the content from there and pastes the information into a funky jacket’s product descriptions, it can lead to serious quality concerns.
Impact Sales
As discussed earlier, plagiarism can impact an online store’s reputation and search engine ranking, directly impacting the brand’s sales. When a brand’s content is not visible to the targeted audience and those who see it know it is copied from somewhere else, it won’t help the store.
Ultimately, the stores will see a significant drop in their sales numbers which could lead to failure. Therefore, eCommerce store owners who want to succeed in this competitive world must publish only high-quality and original work on their stores and avoid plagiarism.
Lose Potential Investments
When a brand is known as a copier or plagiarist and has a terrible reputation in the industry, it may not get reasonable investment offers. Investors only want to invest in businesses that can help them earn good profits. They anticipate that a brand with a bad reputation will fail sooner or later. That’s why they want to save their money on something other than drowning ships.
So without investments, eCommerce stores can fail to upgrade their product range, spend on marketing and advertising to compete with other stores, and may not be able to progress. They can stick to one point and stay within that. This is how plagiarism halts brands’ progress and prevents them from achieving their goals.
Tips to Avoid Plagiarism
So far, we have only discussed the problems related to plagiarism. However, this article is not written only to highlight the issue. It will also provide solid solutions. So, here are the best tips to avoid plagiarism!
Create Content Yourself
The brand must create all the content themselves to avoid all the negative consequences of plagiarism. They must refrain from copying others’ work and publishing it on their websites. Although they can research and explore what kind of content other stores use to promote their products, they can get ideas from there and write the content using their own words.
When they write all the content, they can easily avoid plagiarism and its harmful consequences. Moreover, it can help them build a solid and unique reputation in the industry, which can ultimately help them achieve their goals. Moreover, well-written and original content can also help them build trust that can assist them to grow in their targeted markets.
Ensure Uniqueness
Even if you have written all the content, there are still some chances of unintentional or accidental plagiarism. This kind of plagiarism can also severely impact eCommerce stores because search engines cannot differentiate between intentional and unintentional plagiarism. If the same content is published on another website, it can flag the content for plagiarism.
You should always use a reliable and sophisticated plagiarism detector to avoid the concequences. The plagiarism checker can find all the intentional and unintentional plagiarism instances and highlight them so that users can modify those sentences or paragraphs to make them original. By modifying those plagiarized portions, store owners can ensure that every word published on their website is unique.
Utilize an Advanced Paraphrasing Tool
Paraphrasing tools are also beneficial for content creators and eCommerce store owners. A paraphraser can rewrite all the given content and give it a new look. In case you copy a few lines from any other source, you first need to paste it into a paraphrasing tool and paraphrase it to make it unique.
However, before choosing a paraphrase tool, you should also analyze whether it is known for its excellent paraphrasing. Many paraphrasing tools only replace a few words with their synonyms, which doesn’t help users. They ruin the overall quality of the content.
Therefore, you should only use a paraphrasing tool with advanced algorithms. Only that paraphraser can help you avoid plagiarism and polish your content.
