A customer buys your product, registers the warranty, and files a claim eight months later. Your team approves it. Months after that, someone notices the serial number belongs to a unit sold in another country β to a different person. The product was a fake. The warranty was real. You paid for it.
That gap β between a product being sold and a product being verified β is where a surprising amount of money leaks out of brands. Most never see it on a dashboard.
A scenario most brands have lived through
Picture a mid-size power-tool brand selling through distributors and independent retailers. A buyer finds the same drill on a marketplace for 40% less. Same box, same logo, even a QR sticker on the side.
They scan it. Nothing happens, or it opens a page that looks close enough. They assume itβs fine. Six months later the motor fails, they contact support, and now your team is stuck: reject a βcustomerβ and risk a bad review, or honour a warranty on a unit you never made.
Meanwhile, the brand has no idea how many of these are circulating, or which retailerβs supply chain they slipped through.
Why this quietly costs more than it looks
The obvious cost is the paid-out claim. Thatβs the smallest part.
The bigger costs are slower. A customer who unknowingly bought a fake blames you when it breaks. Support time goes to people who were never your customers. Distributors lose trust when grey-market units undercut their pricing. And your warranty reserve gets spent on products that were never yours to cover.
Thereβs also a reputation cost no spreadsheet shows. When βis this real?β becomes a question buyers ask about your brand, youβve already lost something.
What Iβve seen working in the field
An opinion, after time spent on this problem: most brands treat authentication and warranty as two separate projects. Authentication is βan anti-counterfeit thing for legal.β Warranty is βa customer-service thing for support.β
That separation is the mistake. The moment a customer verifies a product is the best moment to register it, and a registered product is the cleanest proof of authenticity youβll ever get. Theyβre the same event. Splitting them means you collect half the data and close none of the loop.
The brands handling this well arenβt the ones with the fanciest holograms. Theyβre the ones who made verification a normal customer habit β one scan, a real answer, something useful in return.
The numbers behind it
The OECD and EUIPO put global trade in counterfeit and pirated goods at roughly USD 467 billion β about 2.3% of world imports β in their 2025 mapping report. For a single brand, that abstract figure gets concrete the first time a fake unit lands in the claims queue.
On warranty, industry analyses estimate fraudulent or improper claims at 3% to 15% of total warranty spend, while warranty spend itself usually runs 1.5β2% of product sales. At serious volume, that is not rounding error β it is a line item worth defending.
How most brands handle it today
The traditional toolkit is physical: holograms, scratch-off codes, tamper labels, printed serials. They help, but they share one weakness β they are static. A label that never changes can be photographed and reprinted. A scratch code works once and tells you nothing afterward.
On warranty, the default is still a form: paper cards, a registration page nobody fills in, a receipt the customer loses. When a claim arrives, staff verify it by hand, often with little more than a photo and a date.
Both methods share a blind spot: no live connection between the physical product and the brand. You find out something is wrong after the cost has already landed.
What changes when the product can answer for itself
The shift is making the product itself the point of verification β usually through a QR code that resolves to a record you control. Done properly, one scan does several jobs at once:
- Authentication β the code is tied to a specific unit, so a check either matches a genuine record or it does not. Codes that rotate cannot even be cloned from a screenshot, which is where static labels fall down.
- Digital warranty β the same scan registers coverage and stores it where the customer will actually find it later.
- Traceability β you see where units are activated and scanned, which exposes grey-market flows and problem channels.
- Customer verification β buyers get a clear βyes, this is realβ instead of a guess.
- Scan analytics β every interaction becomes data: where, when, how often, by whom.
This is the layer platforms such as Traciqo focus on β connecting the physical code to an authenticated record and a live warranty, so verification and registration stop being two disconnected steps. The technology matters less than the principle: a product should be able to prove itself, on demand, for its whole life.
What brands actually gain
- Fewer paid claims on products you never manufactured
- Cleaner warranty data and faster, more confident claim decisions
- Early visibility into counterfeits and grey-market activity
- A direct line to end customers you usually never meet
- Verification that builds buyer confidence at the point of sale
These are outcomes, not features. The QR code is just the doorway.
Where this is heading
Customer expectations are quietly moving. People already verify reviews, sellers, and payment methods before they buy. Verifying the product is the next normal step β and younger buyers treat βscan to checkβ as ordinary.
The direction is clear: products that carry a living identity, not a printed one. Coverage that updates instead of sitting in a drawer. Verification that follows the product through resale and second owners, not just the first sale.
What to do this quarter
- Put authentication and warranty on the same scan. Stop running them as separate projects.
- Audit your claims for unit history. Serials claimed where they were never sold are your counterfeit signal.
- Make verification rewarding. Give customers a reason to scan so the habit sticks.
- Measure scans, not just sales. Where and how often products get verified tells you things sales data cannot.
- Move coverage somewhere customers keep it. A warranty they can find again is one you will argue about less.
The real point
Authenticity used to be something a brand printed onto a box. It is becoming something a brand has to prove, instantly, to anyone holding the product.
The companies that treat that as a trust feature β not a compliance chore β are the ones customers keep believing in. Protecting your products and protecting your customers turned out to be the same job.
Sources: OECD/EUIPO, Mapping Global Trade in Fakes 2025; industry warranty-fraud analyses.