Dive Brief:
- In its efforts to curtail counterfeits, Amazon says it found, seized and discarded more than 7 million fraudulent products globally in 2023, according to its most recent Brand Protection Report.
- Last year, the company also says it prevented over 700,000 bad actors from creating new seller accounts. There were 6 million of these attempts in 2020, according to the report.
- The proportion of valid infringement notices Amazon receives from brands has dropped by more than 30% since 2020, the e-commerce giant said.
Dive Insight:
In 2023 alone, Amazon said it invested $1.2 billion into fighting counterfeits and had over 15,000 employees dedicated to preventing abuse of its platform. The company also said its Counterfeit Crimes Unit has taken action against more than 21,000 bad actors since 2020 by either reporting them to law enforcement or suing them.
“When businesses choose to sell in our store, they trust we will provide a great selling experience free from competition with bad actors,” Dharmesh Mehta, vice president of worldwide selling partner services at Amazon, wrote in a company blog post. “We understand that customer trust is difficult to earn and easy to lose, which is why trust is at the foundation of the relationships we build and the innovations we make on behalf of our customers and selling partners.”
Along with other e-commerce marketplaces, Amazon has long been under scrutiny for the sale of counterfeit products on its site, where the majority of sales come from third-party sellers. In 2020, Amazon established its Counterfeit Crimes Unit, which is comprised of investigators, data analysts and former federal prosecutors, in response to the problem. Last April, the company took things a step further with the introduction of the Anti-Counterfeit Exchange, an information-sharing platform designed to track counterfeit products.
The persistent challenges around counterfeit products have caught the attention of lawmakers in recent years as well. In 2021, a group of 20 retail executives, including the CEOs of Target, Nordstrom and Best Buy, signed a letter calling for Congress to pass the “Integrity, Notification and Fairness in Online Retail Marketplaces” (INFORM) Consumers Act, which pushed for more transparency around online sellers on Amazon and eBay. A slew of online marketplaces opposed the legislation initially, citing privacy concerns, but supported a later version of the bill.
In 2023, the legislation became law, compelling online marketplaces to collect and verify certain identifying and financial information for high-volume third-party sellers on an annual basis.
