Protecting an Intangible business USP

[mburdett555]

Good morning

I run an online transport website for enthusiasts. My website is newer and lesser known than it's primary competitor, but still a good 8 years old and has around 1500 unique users a day. Many of these are loyal.

Gradually over the years this competitor has adopted certain traits and features in similarity to my website, I'm not particularly bothered about as It could be coincidence.

Unfortunately recently however, I have seen on groups and forums that some of the competitors users are recommending particular features that I have already established, major USPs of my site isn't just coincidence, they've clearly checked out my site, taken the concept and recommended it to my competitor. Why not use my site instead? Well...

My site is already at a significant handicap. My competitor being better off financially, has been able to secure agreements with particular parties in a manner that grants them exclusive industry data no-one else is able to get access to. Ie internal transport company data like vehicle registrations that users are in high demand over for spotting etc.


Cartels and anticompetition laws aside, is there anything I can do to protect my ideas and concepts with them being such a generic principal? Copyright and trademarks would only affect the brand itself and any written work, not something so generic as an idea that nobody else yet employs.

Obviously the personal that came up with the fidget spinner got completely screwed over when Chinese factories started rolling them out cheap, so I'm guessing there's not really anything I can do to protect my ideas which are very broad.

The only thing I can think of is spam the groups and discussions boards with "good idea, this website already does this" but like I say my competitor has data which can take my concepts further so the argument is nullified.

 

[Chris Ashdown]

That's called competition and a natural progression in the life of a company, you look at your competitors and use their ideas if you can, no doubt you have looked at their sites and watched what seems to work for them. The major point is you need to stay ahead of them buy watching all competitors and coming up with fresh idea's for your own site. Few companies have a real USP thats vastly different from others, Car companies spend millions making cars that have little difference from the heard.

Spend more on Marketing to make your company really stand out from the crowd

 

[NickGrogan]

When you first started out, did you know the other site existed? Did you make your site to be better, perhaps by adopting certain traits and features from their site and improving on them?

What's the difference?

Now, they've taken your features and made them better. Great

So this means you need to find new features or new ways to make your website better. Did you think they were not going to react when you took 1500 uniques a day from them?

Very very few websites have a real USP, and if they do it is very hard to copy it as it's typically based by a protectable process or data source.

 

[John Martin]

The best way to combat this is to come up with a USP's that your competitor can't copy.

For example, if you are a small family run business you could focus on the fact that you take a pride in providing a personal service, and that people can deal with the same person every time rather than dealing with some large faceless entity with rotating staff.

The big boys don't always provide the best service, as I found out in my own niche.