The Amazon 2020 Brand Protection Report is out, providing a comprehensive view of Amazon say that they ensure customers shop from authentic products in its stores.
The timing is interesting as news breaks that Amazon may have suspended some of the biggest private label brands on their marketplace with turnover topping $1 billion. The question we ask is do Amazon go far enough when suspending private label merchants?
The thrust of the Amazon 2020 Brand Protection Report is to highlight the significant investments in dedicated teams and industry-leading machine learning technology Amazon puts in place to proactively protect customers, brands and selling partners from counterfeiters, and to hold them accountable if they attempt to sell fakes through Amazon. In 2020, Amazon invested more than $700 million and employed more than 10,000 people to protect its’ stores from fraud and abuse.
“Amazon was an important partner for the millions of small and medium businesses that sell in our store during the pandemic. We’ve helped our selling partners keep their virtual doors open, and despite increased attempts by bad actors, continued to ensure that the vast majority of customers shop with confidence from our broad selection of authentic products. Our team’s relentless innovation has helped us stop 6 million attempts to create a selling account and more than 10 billion suspect listings as we continue to drive counterfeits to zero.”
– Dharmesh Mehta, Vice President, Customer Trust and Partner Support, Amazon
Get practical with Amazon brand protection
At Tamebay Live (running 17th to 21st May next week!), Amazon marketplace seller Pattern will be joined by some of the consumer brands it partners with, to explain their approach to brand protection and other reasons that the marketplace is being elevated within their channel mix.
Sign up here to learn how to protect your brand on Amazon!
Brand Protection Report highlights
Highlights from the 2020 Brand Protection Report show Amazon’s significant innovation and worldwide progress in combatting counterfeits and protecting customers and brands, including:
- Amazon invested more than $700 million to protect its stores from fraud and abuse.
- Amazon employed more than 10,000 people to protect its store from fraud and abuse.
- Amazon’s verification processes prevented over 6 million attempts to create selling accounts, stopping bad actors before they published a single product for sale.
- Only 6% of attempted account registrations passed Amazon’s robust verifications processes and listed products for sale.
- Amazon seized more than 2 million products that were sent to its fulfillment centers and that it detected as counterfeit before being sent to a customer. Amazon destroyed those products to prevent them from being resold elsewhere in the supply chain.
- Amazon blocked more than 10 billion suspected bad listings before they were published in its stores.
- Amazon Transparency, a serialization service that protects individual product units, enabled the protection of more than 500 million product units.
- Fewer than 0.01% of all products sold on Amazon received a counterfeit complaint from customers. Those complaints were then investigated for accuracy.
- More than 7,000 small and medium-sized businesses were connected to trusted law firms in the U.S. and Europe through IP Accelerator. These businesses successfully submitted trademark applications and received early access to Brand Registry’s brand protection tools.
- Amazon established its Counterfeit Crimes Unit to build and refer cases to law enforcement, undertake independent investigations or joint investigations with brands, and pursue civil litigation against counterfeiters.
“Brand owners can’t be in all places at all times. Having the Amazon brand protection tools available to small businesses like Food Huggers gives us the ability to protect our brands and our IP around the globe.”
– Adrienne McNicholas, Co-Founder of a small business, Food Huggers
The Brand Protection Report outlines Amazon’s anti-counterfeiting approach, including:
- Robust proactive controls
Amazon leverages a combination of advanced machine learning capabilities and expert human investigators to protect its store proactively from bad actors and bad products. Amazon is constantly innovating in this space to stay ahead of bad actors and their continued attempts to circumvent its controls.
- Powerful tools for brands
Brands know their products best. They know their logos, patterns, and intellectual property inside and out. Amazon empowers brands to partner with us through tools like Brand Registry, Transparency, and Project Zero. These tools are powered by Amazon’s advanced technology and each brand’s expert knowledge of their products. Together, we can more effectively detect and stop counterfeiters, which allows us to better protect customers and rights owners.
- Holding counterfeiters accountable
Amazon continues to innovate on its robust proactive controls and powerful tools for brands, and won’t rest until there are zero counterfeits in its store. This is an escalating battle with criminals that continue to attempt to find ways to sell counterfeits, and the only way to permanently stop these counterfeiters is to hold them accountable through the court system and criminal prosecution.
You can download the full report here.
