Poizon Rejected 41.1% of Submitted Items. That Is a Marketing Problem.

📊 A rejection rate of 41.1%, and what it is not

On 8 October, Poizon — the overseas version of the Chinese authentication-first marketplace Dewu — published its authentication figures for the first half of 2026. Users submitted roughly 748,000 items. About 307,500 of them, or 41.1%, failed authentication on suspicion of being counterfeit.

Two clarifications belong before anything else, because the number is easy to misuse.

First, 41.1% is the failure rate among items submitted for authentication. It is not the counterfeit rate of the market, of the platform's own listings, or of Chinese e-commerce. People submit items for authentication precisely because they are unsure, which is why a high rejection rate on this base is expected rather than alarming. An independent Chinese e-commerce commentator made the same point when the data landed.

Second, this is the platform's own published data. The figures reach us through Chinese trade media reporting Poizon's release. We have not seen the underlying report, and no third party has audited the number.

With both caveats stated, the data still deserves an advertiser's attention — for what it reveals about the environment a brand walks into, not as a measure of that environment.

📋 What the data actually says

The direction of travel matters more than the level. Submissions rose 50.4%. Rejections rose 56.7% — faster. The rejection rate moved to 41.1% from 39.5%, which means counterfeits did not merely scale with growing trade; they grew slightly ahead of it.

By category, footwear accounted for 68.1% of rejected items, apparel 17.7% and bags 10.4%.

🏷️ The six brands at the top are the ones with China plans

The named brands, in order: Nike at 58,348 rejected items, or 19% of the rejected total; Jordan at 48,355, or 15.7%; then adidas Originals, Louis Vuitton, New Balance and Balenciaga.

That list is not random. It ranks high-velocity, high-resale-value footwear and luxury — the categories where a counterfeit carries the highest margin and the buyer has the least ability to verify by inspection. Footwear taking 68.1% of rejections is the same finding expressed in category form.

Which is the point for a brand owner reading this. The brands that attract counterfeiting are the brands that attract demand. These are not weak products with a piracy problem; they are products whose Chinese demand is established enough that somebody manufactures for it. Often the counterfeits reach the market before the brand's own official channel does.

🛒 Counterfeiting is a demand-side problem before it is a legal one

Most brand teams file counterfeiting under legal and intellectual property, hand it to counsel, and consider it handled. That framing misses the part that costs revenue.

A 41.1% rejection rate on submitted items is a signal about what buyers believe. When a significant share of goods circulating in a category is fake, the buyer's default assumption stops being "this is genuine" and becomes "I need to check". Every purchase then carries a verification step the buyer previously did not have to perform.

That step changes behaviour at the last stage of the funnel. A buyer who has settled on a model, a size and a colour will stop, before paying, to answer a question that has nothing to do with the product: is this the real thing, and is this seller authorised? A brand that has not answered that question in Chinese, in the place where the question is asked, loses a sale it has already paid to earn.

🔒 The supply side is being tightened at the same time

The counterfeit data arrived in the same season as a round of platform enforcement, and the two point the same way.

Chinese cross-border import platforms have been moving from checking paperwork to verifying the physical supply chain. Reported requirements include:

• Douyin Global asks for both an overseas production certificate and an overseas circulation certificate — factory registration details, a brand-to-factory production agreement, a certificate of origin, a free-sale certificate, a customs declaration from the past 90 days, and evidence of real sales at three different overseas stores, including continuous single-take video or photographs. Merchants get 30 calendar days to submit, after which listings are removed.
• Tmall Global's origin-traceability programme asks for origin documents, free-circulation or market-approval proof, and visual evidence of genuine overseas circulation — a single-take video inside an overseas supermarket or pharmacy for offline goods, or sales screenshots from a reputable overseas e-commerce site for online goods. More than 300 brands have been reported as signed up since the programme launched in May.
• Xiaohongshu's global purchase channel now accepts cosmetics only with formal authorisation from the brand or a first-tier distributor, with the chain traceable to the brand itself.
• Pinduoduo issued a comparable notice on verifying overseas circulation and production evidence in May.

Read together, these say something simple: a brand can no longer be present in China on paperwork alone. It has to be able to point at real overseas production and real overseas retail. The question a platform now asks is not "do you have an authorisation letter" but "can you prove you actually sell this".

That is good news for legitimate brands, and it is also a workload. The evidence satisfying these checks — third-party retail presence, verifiable overseas sales — is not something a marketing team can produce on request. It has to already exist.

🔍 What this changes in a China search campaign

Three adjustments follow, and none of them is about counterfeiting policy.

Authenticity is a keyword category, and most overseas brands do not bid on it. Chinese buyers search the local terms for genuine goods, official channels and authorised sellers, plus the comparison phrasing around authenticity and after-sales support. These queries sit at the bottom of the funnel, immediately before payment. A keyword plan built from category and feature terms misses them entirely, because these terms describe a doubt rather than a product.

The official channel has to be findable as the source of record. If the buyer's check happens in a search box, the brand's own destination has to be the answer that appears. Where an official store exists on another platform, the China campaign should point at it without ambiguity. The cost of getting this wrong is not a lost impression; it is a sale that was already earned.

The landing page has to resolve the doubt, not restate the product. A page that lists features does not answer "is this authentic, and who is selling it". Pages that convert on these queries carry the authorisation, the channel, the after-sales terms and the verification route. That is a different page from the one a brand would build for a category term.

Stated plainly: none of this fixes counterfeiting. It recovers the buyers who are lost to it.

🏢 Where Baidu PPC Pro comes in

The China side of this has four prerequisites, and none of them changes with a platform's data release.

An account without a Chinese entity. Baidu requires a Chinese business licence to open an advertising account. Most overseas brands do not hold one, and obtaining one takes months. Baidu PPC Pro opens and manages the account without it, which decides whether a brand can be in a Chinese auction at all.

A keyword map built from local terms, including the authenticity terms. Chinese consumers search the local term for the category, the local term for the feature and the local phrase for the problem they want solved. They also search the local phrasing for genuine goods and official sellers. Both sets have to be built from observed search behaviour rather than translated.

Creative that clears review the first time. Advertising in China is filed and reviewed per industry, with claims checked against permitted phrasing. Authenticity claims are held to that standard too, so the wording has to be defensible at submission rather than rewritten after rejection.

Landing pages that answer the search. Chinese-language pages that resolve the comparison the user just typed — and, on authenticity queries, that show the authorised route rather than asserting quality.

📅 What to watch, and notes on the source

Two things are worth tracking.

1. Whether the rejection rate keeps rising faster than submission volume. Two half-year data points are not a trend; a third would be.
2. Whether Poizon publishes the underlying report. A figure this quotable will circulate without its caveats, and the caveats are the difference between a statistic and a scare number.

Notes on the source:

• Figures come from Poizon's published first-half 2026 authentication data, released 8 October 2026 and reported by Chinese trade media including Ebrun. The original report has not been reviewed here.
• 41.1% is the share of items submitted for authentication that failed. It is not the counterfeit rate of the platform, of the category or of the Chinese market, and it should not be quoted as one.
• The category split — footwear 68.1%, apparel 17.7%, bags 10.4% — is as reported by AMZ123 from the same release.
• The platform verification requirements described above are platform policies reported by Chinese industry media, not government regulations, and no independent body audits them.
• No estimate of counterfeit prevalence across the Chinese market as a whole is asserted here, because no reliable one exists.