Repurposing Supplier Content: Legal Guide for E-commerce

Almost every e-commerce business works with supplier-provided product content at some point. Manufacturers and distributors supply product descriptions, images, specification sheets, and marketing copy as part of their sales enablement. The question that many sellers overlook -- until it becomes a problem -- is whether they have the legal right to use this content in their own listings, and if so, under what conditions.

This article examines the legal landscape around repurposing supplier content for e-commerce, covering copyright ownership, common licensing arrangements, the risks of unauthorised use, and how AI-powered content generation offers a practical alternative that avoids these issues entirely.

Who Owns Supplier-Provided Content?

By default, the creator of a piece of content owns the copyright. When a manufacturer writes a product description, takes product photographs, or creates marketing materials, the manufacturer holds the copyright unless they have explicitly transferred or licensed those rights to their resellers. "They sent it to us" is not a legal licence to use the content however you wish.

The reality is more nuanced. Most manufacturer-reseller relationships include an implied licence to use product content for the purpose of selling the product. However, the scope of this implied licence varies. Using a manufacturer's product image on your marketplace listing is generally accepted as standard practice. Copying their entire description verbatim to your own webshop and modifying it for SEO purposes may stretch beyond what was implicitly authorised.

The distinction matters most when disputes arise. If a manufacturer decides to enforce their copyright -- perhaps because they are launching their own direct-to-consumer channel and want to differentiate from resellers -- any content you are using without an explicit licence becomes a liability. This is not a hypothetical concern; several high-profile cases in recent years have involved manufacturers asserting copyright over product descriptions used by unauthorised resellers.

Common Licensing Arrangements

The safest approach is to have an explicit content licence in your reseller agreement. This licence should specify what types of content you can use (text, images, video), which channels you can use it on (your own webshop, specific marketplaces, social media), whether you can modify it, and whether the licence is exclusive or shared with other resellers.

Some manufacturers operate product content syndication programs that provide standardised content with clear usage rights. These programs -- often managed through platforms like Icecat, Syndigo, or Salsify -- distribute enriched product content to authorised resellers with defined terms of use. Participating in these programs provides legal clarity and often gives you access to higher-quality content than what comes in a standard product data feed.

For products sourced from distributors rather than directly from manufacturers, the licensing chain becomes more complex. Your distributor may have content usage rights from the manufacturer, but whether those rights extend to their reseller network depends on the specific agreement. When in doubt, reach out to the original content owner for clarification.

The SEO Problem with Shared Content

Even when you have the legal right to use supplier content, there is a compelling business reason not to: SEO. When dozens or hundreds of resellers use identical manufacturer descriptions, Google treats all but one of those listings as duplicate content. Your product page competes against every other reseller using the same text, and Google selects a single canonical version to show in search results -- often the retailer with the highest domain authority, not necessarily you.

This means that using supplier descriptions verbatim effectively concedes your organic search visibility for that product to your largest competitors. The fix is obvious: create unique descriptions. But doing this manually for a large catalog is impractical, which is exactly the problem AI content generation was designed to solve.

The combination of legal risk and SEO disadvantage makes a strong case for generating original content rather than repurposing supplier material. You can use supplier data -- specifications, features, technical details -- as input for AI generation, then produce descriptions that are both legally original (you own the copyright to AI-generated content from your own tool) and SEO-unique (no other seller has the same text).

AI as the Copyright-Clean Alternative

When you use an AI tool to generate product descriptions from structured product data, the resulting content is an original work. You are not copying, translating, or paraphrasing anyone else's copyrighted text -- you are creating new text from factual product information. Facts themselves (dimensions, weight, materials) are not copyrightable, so using this data as input for AI generation is legally straightforward.

This approach transforms the content question from "do I have permission to use this?" to "how do I generate the best possible original content?" The latter is a far better business position. You own your content, can use it anywhere without restriction, and differentiate your listings from competitors who are all sharing the same manufacturer copy.

For product images, the situation is different because images cannot be generated from specifications alone. Many sellers now supplement manufacturer product photos with their own photography, lifestyle images, or AI-enhanced product renders. If you rely on manufacturer images, ensure your reseller agreement explicitly covers image licensing for all your intended channels.

Practical Steps for Content Independence

Audit your current content to understand how much relies on supplier material. Categorise each product's content as: original (written by your team or generated by your AI tool), lightly modified supplier content, or verbatim supplier content. This audit reveals your exposure and helps prioritise which products need original content most urgently.

Prioritise your highest-traffic and highest-revenue products for original content generation. These products have the most to gain from unique descriptions (better SEO) and the most to lose from copyright issues (higher visibility means higher risk of enforcement). Use supplier data as the factual input, then generate original descriptions that reflect your brand voice and your customers' needs.

Establish a content creation standard going forward: all new products get original AI-generated descriptions before going live. This prevents the backlog from growing while you work through the existing catalog. Over time, as you replace supplier content with original descriptions, your entire catalog becomes both legally independent and SEO-optimised.