Under mounting pressure to tackle counterfeit products, Amazon said in its second-annual report that it prevented 4 billion bad listings from making it to its site and got rid of more than 3 million counterfeit products last year.
The results released on Wednesday were mixed compared to 2020, when Amazon blocked 10 billion listings and got rid of 2 million counterfeit products. The Seattle-based e-commerce juggernaut also saw a decrease in intellectual property infringement complaints in 2021, while increasing the number of brands active on its site.
According to the report, Amazon blocked more than 2.5 million attempts to create fake accounts in its third-party marketplace, where sellers can list their products directly to consumers. That number is a drop of about 58% from the efforts closed in 2020, which the company attributes to its vetting process and other efforts to deter bad actors.
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But Juozas Caziucanas, founder of e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse, said it can be difficult to know independently what exactly caused those declines, whether it’s Amazon’s policies or other factors.
Counterfeit sellers have long plagued other e-commerce retailers, including Amazon and eBay. And Amazon has stepped up efforts to fight it in recent years amid increasing scrutiny from brands and lawmakers pushing for an anti-counterfeiting law.
Amazon supports the House version of an online retail bill, known as the Information Act, that would require online marketplaces to collect contact and financial information from high-volume sellers and disclose certain information to consumers. . Amazon opposed an earlier Senate version of the bill, which would require online retailers to collect information from a large group of third-party merchants.
Meanwhile, TechNet, a lobbying group that counts Amazon and eBay as some of its members, is pushing against another bill that would make e-commerce platforms liable for counterfeit goods sold on their sites. Will give An Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the company “recognizes the intent of the law to prevent counterfeiting” and looks forward to working with Congress to achieve that goal.
In its report, Amazon said it implemented a program last year that made it harder for bad actors to register for sell accounts by requiring a face-to-face conversation with a company team member to verify their identities. Had given. It says it is also verifying the physical location and means of payment of sellers and is leveraging machine learning to detect risks about potential accounts.
Last year, the company said it spent more than $900 million to push back against fraud, and sued or referred more than 600 vendors for investigation in other places such as the US and China. Amazon did not disclose the source of most of the counterfeit products in the report, but China has been a poor place. And the company will not share data that helps prevent counterfeit products from showing up on its site, said Mary Beth Westmoreland, Amazon’s vice president of brand protection.
According to Marketplace Pulse, the share of top China-based merchants in Amazon’s third-party marketplace has been declining steadily since the end of 2020, a trend some experts believe may be due to pandemic-induced supply chain snapping. The reason could be and the company’s recent efforts could be cracking down. On prohibited activity, including fake reviews. Last year, the company suspended several major China-based vendors and fired 50,000 merchants for allegedly violating its rules.
Data from Marketplace Pulse shows that 55% of the top sellers on the Amazon US Marketplace are home businesses, up from 48% in November 2020.
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