• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, January 9, 2007

In a recent episode of ABC's "Ugly Betty," a character passed off a fake designer bag as the real thing. Now, it appears that the TV network's e-commerce store has done likewise.

The e-commerce store, www.abctvstore.asseenon.com, offers links to clothing and accessories worn by characters on ABC TV shows. As of Monday morning, the store linked to at least one site, www.topbagzone.com, that sells what appear to be fake handbags.

The ABC TV e-commerce site, which launched last February, identified one of the bags shown on the Nov. 16 episode of "Ugly Betty" as a Hermes Birkin bag, and provided a link to the China-based online store topbagzone.com. That site sold the bag for $500--a fraction of the price Birkin bags usually cost. News of the link surfaced this weekend on the Web site Television Without Pity.

The link to topbagzone.com was removed from the ABC store by early Monday evening.

In addition to the Birkin bag, the online store Topbagzone.com claims to sell bags by Gucci, Chloe, Coach, and other designers--all for far below market cost. Several supposed Kooba bags, for instance, go for $158 on the site; genuine Kooba bags tend to sell for at least three times that amount. A Coach spokeswoman said the company authorizes the sale of its bags online only at its own Web site, Coach.com, and that of Macy's.

Mike Fitzsimmons, CEO of Delivery Agent--the San Francisco-based company that manages the ABC store--said the company has never knowingly provided links to sites selling fakes. "We do not condone or endorse the sale of counterfeit goods," Fitzsimmons said. "We're clearly not in the business of driving traffic to counterfeiters."

Fitzsimmons added that the company offers links to purchase more than 110,000 products, sold by more than 400 online retailers--all of whom have been vetted.

ABC did not return several telephone calls seeking comment.