04/05/2023

Amazon Recaps Efforts to Protect Buyers, Sellers

E-comm giant releases annual brand protection report

Senior Editor

Amazon reports that it prevented 800,000 attempts to create new selling accounts.

Amazon, which accrues and leverages copious amounts of information, is out with its 2022 "Brand Protection Report" that outlines ways the company and its technologies have stopped “bad actors” from infiltrating the market. According to Amazon, the company’s defensive efforts curbed more than 800,000 attempts to create new selling accounts, down from 2.5 million attempts in 2021 and 6 million tries in 2020.

The report also noted that the company has held more would-be sellers accountable, as its counterfeit crimes unit sued or referred for investigation more than 1,300 lawbreakers around the world. As a result of its work, Amazon was able to identify, seize and appropriately dispose of more than 6 million counterfeit products. On a parallel, track, the company teamed with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and U.S. Customs and Border Protection on educational campaigns to ensure that people can better discern authentic and counterfeit products online.

Additionally, Amazon shared that the number of valid notices of infringing products submitted by brands in 2022 declined by more than 35% compared to 2021. The company’s Transparency product serialization service, which uses codes to uniquely identify units of enrolled products, continues to gain traction; the number of brand enrolling in that service rose 40% over the prior year.

Amazon uses robust seller verification methods ranging from one-on-one video chats with sellers to machine learning detection tools as firewalls against proverbial bad actors. The retail behemoth also continually improves its automated protection technologies, which have scanned more than 8 billion daily attempted changes to product detail pages.

“We are proud of the progress we made this past year, and we will continue to innovate until we drive the number of counterfeits in our store to zero. We also appreciate the growing industry-wide partnership and collaboration in the fight against counterfeit,” said Dharmesh Mehta, VP, worldwide selling partner services at Amazon.

Seattle-based Amazon is No. 2 on The PG 100, Progressive Grocer’s 2022 list of the top food and consumables retailers in North America.