More than 1,300 sellers investigated! Amazon strikes hard against counterfeiting

In the past year, Amazon has seized and disposed of more than 6 million counterfeit products worldwide , which is twice the number in 2021.

Amazon invested more than $1.2 billion in strengthening cooperation with third-party sellers last year , a 30% increase from the year before. Data shows that third-party sellers account for as much as 58% of the platform's total sales, so how to constrain third-party sellers has become an urgent problem for Amazon to solve.

In its annual brand protection report, Amazon said its team fighting counterfeits has 15,000 employees, including software developers, data scientists and researchers.

And efforts to combat counterfeits have been paying off: Amazon detected 800,000 attempts to create new accounts to sell knockoff products last year.

However, Amazon also admitted that despite some progress, counterfeit and shoddy products are still a real problem in the entire e-commerce industry and all platforms, and more time and effort need to be invested to deal with it.

“Our rigorous seller verification and strategy of holding violators accountable through legal action is an effective deterrent to criminal activity,” Dhamesh Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of global selling partners, said in an email.

One of the measures is to conduct video chats with sellers to verify their identities. Amazon said that in 2022, Amazon transferred more than 1,300 violating sellers for investigation in the United States, Britain, the European Union and China , compared with 600 in 2021.

The surge in the number of counterfeit and shoddy products will not only cause consumers to lose trust in the platform, but the platform will also face legal problems due to its regulatory responsibilities.

In a ruling last December, the European Court of Justice held that Amazon was liable for third-party sellers selling counterfeit products on its platform and referred two lawsuits by French brand LouBoutin against Amazon to national courts for trial.

Amazon believes that as a platform, it only plays the role of a middleman, and it has also taken many actions to combat piracy.

Its counterfeit product combat team has worked with companies such as Cartier, World Wrestling Entertainment, Felco, General Electric and King Technology in 2022 to help it detect counterfeit products on its platform.

However, Amazon’s largest anti-counterfeiting operation was at the end of 2022, when Chinese police destroyed three counterfeiting dens based on information provided by Amazon.

Amazon said that the absolute number of valid infringement notices submitted by brands last year decreased by more than 35%. As the anti-counterfeiting efforts continue to increase, there will definitely be fewer and fewer people engaged in counterfeiting and selling counterfeit goods in the future.

Amazon

Seller

Fighting against counterfeiting