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bigbasket, an online supermarket backed by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, has served a cease and desist notice to Coimbatore-based start-up dailybasket.com asking the latter to close down its business and handover its domains. The notice alleges infringement of bigbasket’s trademark and brand.
“We (dailybasket.com) are a tiny online/offline grocery startup currently only serving in Coimbatore. We recently received a cease and desist letter from bigbasket to close down our operations and hand over our domains (ie, our business) to them because we have 'basket' in our brand and we also sell groceries online,” dailybasket posted in a website <bbisabully.com>.
”We started our operations in August 2020. Our plan is to set up a string of mini supermarkets throughout Coimbatore and make them act as delivery hubs for our online business. Currently, we operate one warehouse and about to open a mini-store on February 25. Though we have a word 'basket' in our brand and we do deliver online groceries, it doesn't mean we copied their trademarks or unethically copied their website and apps. We never misuse bigbasket's brand in any way as they claimed in the cease and desist letter. This is our attempt to debunk their claims,” it said.
When contacted, bigbasket declined to comment.
Except the word 'basket', there are no similarities or trademark violations in the brand logo. Colours are different, font is different, graphics is different and the name itself is different, it said, adding, “so they want to sue us because we have 'basket' in our name”.
According to the notice, dailybasket.com should stop using the domain name, discontinue the mobile apps, stop all the operations immediately and transfer the domain name to bigbasket.
“The use of the word ‘daily’ along with ‘basket’ does not make your name distinctive, and our client strongly believes that you have dishonestly adopted the name and mark ‘dailybasket’ to make your name and mark deceptively and/or confusingly similar to our client’s brand bigbasket,” dailybasket said, quoting the legal notice.
bigbasket has also alleged a deliberate copying its layout (with insignificant minor changes), and created a mobile App under name “Daily Basket Coimbatore-Best grocery delivery app”, for e-commerce business and selling products that are extremely similar to its mobile applications.