Amazon Lets Brands Remove Fakes From eCommerce Platform

Amazon is adopting a new approach to fighting counterfeits on its platform, announcing on Thursday (Feb. 28) the launch of Project Zero.

The new program, which the eCommerce giant laid out in a blog post, empowers brands to bring counterfeits to zero on Amazon properties. It relies on advanced technology, machine learning and the knowledge brands have of their own intellectual property to detect counterfeit products being sold.

The new effort is broken down into three components: automated protections, self-service counterfeit removal and product serialization. With the automated protections, Amazon deploys its machine learning expertise to scan its stores and proactively remove fakes. Brands provide their logos, trademarks and other key data, and Amazon scans over five billion product listing updates each day to find counterfeit offerings.

“We’ve been testing these automated protections with a number of brands, and on average, our automated protections proactively stop 100 times more suspected counterfeit products as compared to what we reactively remove based on reports from brands,” Amazon said in the post.

The self-service counterfeit removal tool gives brands the ability to remove copycat listings on their own. In the past, Amazon said brands had to report a counterfeit to Amazon to be investigated. By removing that step, the eCommerce giant said it provides brands with “an unprecedented ability to directly control and remove listings from our store.”

The product serialization service lets Amazon individually scan and confirm the authenticity of each product purchased on Amazon stores. As part of its manufacturing process, a unique code is assigned to every unit. Whenever a product is ordered, it is then scanned and verified. “We can now detect and stop counterfeiting for every product unit before it reaches a customer,” Amazon said in the post.