
India’s largest online grocery website BigBasket has issued a cease and desist notice to startup Daily Basket for using the word ‘basket’ in its name. The grocery company has asserted that the startup breaches its trademark and brand. Daily Basket, as a retort published a blog ‘BB is a bully’ and refuted the claims.
The notice stated, “…the mere mention or reference of a name containing “basket” in word or logo form for any e-commerce business and related products conjure in the minds of the relevant class of consumers and members of the trade as that of being associated with our client.”
The BigBasket notice also included that Daily Basket is functioning as an e-commerce business that provides products and services that are very similar through an alike domain name. BigBasket said in its notice that Daily Basket uses a ‘deceptively and/or confusingly similar name and mark.
The notice to Daily Basket, read “Your unauthorized acts are severely detrimental to the distinctive character and reputation of our client’s brand ‘BigBasket/Bigbasket.com’. The same is causing irreparable injury that cannot be computed in monetary terms. For such illegal acts, our client is entitled under civil and criminal law to take legal action against you and to seek legal recourse by way of a permanent injunction, the account of profits and/or damages, in addition to other available reliefs, without any notice to you.”
The startup, Daily Basket made the legal notice public and published a blog in an attempt to contradict BigBasket’s claims. “Except for the word ‘basket’, there are no similarities or trademark violations in the brand logo. The colours are different, the font is different, the graphics are different and the name itself is different. So they want to sue us because we have ‘basket’ in our name. The last time we checked no one has a monopoly in the word ‘basket’ or having the word ‘basket’ and selling groceries online. NaturesBasket.com was actually started in 2005, way before BigBasket,” said the blog of Daily Basket.
BigBasket said in the notice that the layout of the site was similar to theirs. Daily Basket fought back saying that theirs is a different UI (user interface) altogether. Category menu, search-bar and product visuals are similar but that’s for all platforms including Grofers, Jiomart, Amazon and Flipkart, said the startup.
BigBasket is on the brink of finalizing divesting a majority stake to Tata Group for $2 billion. Daily Basket, on the other hand, has a 3,000 square feet warehouse and operates only in Coimbatore. It aims to open its first offline store soon.