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Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting

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Re: Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting

#161

Post by asdfasdf1233 »

prepend wrote: post #36
NathanKP wrote: post #24

Full disclosure I work for Amazon (on the web services side). The author of this article clearly doesn't know much about selling on Amazon, because what he is asking for is possible. It's called the Amazon Brand Registry. You can contact the infringment team using the details here and initiate the process of getting your brand / ASIN locked so that other people can't sell it without your permission: https://www.amazo…

Why is Amazon not actively seeking out patterns of counterfeiters and suggesting this to sellers. Just doing simple image machine learning should get 90% of scammers. He AWS team is great about this. Looking for abnormalities. Looking for posted AWS keys. Proactively. The retail guys need to get some of the cloud guy smarts. Or ethics. Either/or will help stop this. I don’t sell, but I can barely buy from amazon beca…

Amazon is in fact searching for and proactively blocking counterfeiters by using image searching, machine learning, etc.

There are literally multiple teams with lots of software engineers working on these problems.

Currently entry into brand registry is a requirement for these programs. You would be shocked to see the head count and money Amazon is spending in this area, they are investing heavily.

Re: Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting

#162

Post by URSpider94 »

prepend wrote: post #157
URSpider94 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing the point. They are not creating a new product that is a copy of the original, they are registering with Amazon as a supplier of the genuine product, but shipping counterfeits into the warehouse. They are then pricing their counterfeits dynamically so that they always get the “buy box”. There’s no machine learning to do. The only way to find the counterfeit is to inspect each shipment by hand vs a ref…

If an existing seller is listing the product that already exists. It can be examined against other listings and be reviewed. If it’s a brand new seller then interview the seller. It’s not perfect but will provide incremental improvement.

I think the point you’re missing is that the normal course of business for most products is that many distributors compete to sell the same item on Amazon. Go look for example at Canon cameras, you will see 10-15 different legitimate sellers all offering different prices, all on the same detail page - you have to click through to “this item available from xxx sellers”

If you’re interviewing sellers, what do you ask them in the interview? “Are you selling counterfeits?” What are your grounds for allowing them to list an item?

If you want to inspect a new listing, what do you want to inspect? Maybe you inspect the first shipment. Fine. People will figure that out and send a small first shipment of real items, then start sending fakes.

Re: Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting

#163

Post by fencepost »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #135
fencepost wrote: post #33

The writer advises people to "look at the seller," but Amazon's commingling of products means that doing so is often useless. I believe I've also seen mention that there's a way to prevent that by assigning your own numbers and paying Amazon more, but for something like this where there is only one legitimate supplier I'm not sure it would do any good. (edit: NathanKP posted relevant links as I was posting) What's am…

You need not pay Amazon to label your products with your FNSKU to avoid commingling -- sellers can do themselves with a printer and tape. Amazon simply offers the option and charges $0.20/unit to do it.

But if you're already the only legitimate source for that SKU what do you do? If a counterfeiter orders one of your items then duplicates the packaging including the SKU/UPC will it get commingled with your product even if it shouldn't?

Re: Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting

#164

Post by riknos314 »

jlg23 wrote: post #131
prepend wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is Amazon not actively seeking out patterns of counterfeiters and suggesting this to sellers. Just doing simple image machine learning should get 90% of scammers. He AWS team is great about this. Looking for abnormalities. Looking for posted AWS keys. Proactively. The retail guys need to get some of the cloud guy smarts. Or ethics. Either/or will help stop this. I don’t sell, but I can barely buy from amazon beca…

> Why is Amazon not actively seeking out patterns of counterfeiters and suggesting this to sellers. Why would any company spend money to decrease their revenue? I have yet to see one company that does not test the boundaries of the legally permissible to maximize profits.

One of Amazon's leadership principles is Earn Trust

It's why their customer service has always been recognized as one of the best.

Re: Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting

#165

Post by asdfasdf1233 »

sabalaba wrote: post #47
NathanKP wrote: post #24

Full disclosure I work for Amazon (on the web services side). The author of this article clearly doesn't know much about selling on Amazon, because what he is asking for is possible. It's called the Amazon Brand Registry. You can contact the infringment team using the details here and initiate the process of getting your brand / ASIN locked so that other people can't sell it without your permission: https://www.amazo…

Since you work on the web services side it's forgivable that you would think that link to reporting infringement is an effective solution / something that Amazon pays close attention to. We've sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of product on Amazon, found a company selling a counterfeit version of our product, and submitted a complaint to that URL. That was on 4/5/2016. We have yet to receive a response. The…

There are tons of new tools for brands that were launched in 2017 to help brands proactively prevent this sort of behavior.

Apply to the brand registry with your trademark info and you’ll have access to tools to proactively protect your brand.

Amazon is taking this sort of behavior very seriously and has added systems in place to help prevent this.

In addition to the brand registry you might also want to check out their transparency program.

https://digiday.com/marketing/amazon-grows-transparency-prog...

Re: Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting

#166

Post by asdfasdf1233 »

URSpider94 wrote: post #144
prepend wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in general, but literally all you have to do is reverse image search new product listings against existing products and then add a call out to manually review this. This isn’t even complicated stuff. To get fancy you could compare against the millions of known frauds and apply that to new products. The thing that bugs me is that they do nothing. This stupid “it’s all on you to register your brand and yadda ya…

You are missing the point. They are not creating a new product that is a copy of the original, they are registering with Amazon as a supplier of the genuine product, but shipping counterfeits into the warehouse. They are then pricing their counterfeits dynamically so that they always get the “buy box”. There’s no machine learning to do. The only way to find the counterfeit is to inspect each shipment by hand vs a ref…

“The only way to find the counterfeit is to inspect each shipment by hand”

This is basically what the Amazon transparency program is. Is tracks each item from manufacturer all the way through to your door with unique code scanned along the way. You can use the app to see where it came from.

Re: Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting

#167

Post by Momquist »

gowld wrote: post #126
x0x0 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go look at the atrocious reviews of chinese knock-off power supplies. I mean, they might not burn your house down, so we're cool, right?

Calling them "Chinese" knock-off power supplies is xenophobic and/or racist. The top-quality authentic power supplies are just as Chinese as the counterfeits. Same set of factories make all this stuff, but the counterfeits use cheaper materials and skip components.

Saying the truth is racist now? Are these cheap knock-offs Chinese or not? China remains the main source of counterfeit goods. This is a fact.

> Counterfeit goods are estimated to amount to approximately 12.5 % of China’s total exports and over 1.5 % of its GDP. This results in estimations that 72 % of counterfeit goods currently in circulation in three of the world’s largest markets for such products, namely the EU, Japan and the USA,have been exported from China.

https://www.europol.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/...

Re: Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting

#168

Post by jamesgeck0 »

Counterfeiters on Amazon have been hitting the board game market hard. From an interview [1]:

> We feel, and this number is speculative (but it's going to be somewhere on that range), that Asmodee North America’s sales are going to be affected somewhere between five and ten million dollars, this year alone. We believe for some games, that more than 70% of all sales in the U.S. market have been counterfeit.

1. https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/39296/icv2-interview-asm...

Re: Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting

#169

Post by 8ytecoder »

stryk wrote: post #151
hop wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost everytime we contact them, we ask them to lock our products down. It's a mystery how sellers get Brand Gating, but there is plenty in the forums about it. That's part of the reason this was written, hopefully someone there can do something about it.

Hey man, this is a bit off-topic for this thread, but I have to mention that I got one of the Elevation Lab Anchor under-desk mounts when they were on sell for like 10 bucks a week or so ago. It's great, it works better than I was expecting (my main concern was the longevity of the adhesive, but I did some research into the 3M VHB and it's legit!) Now for the part that's not off topic: to remind myself how long ago I…

For Amazon it's the same product from different sellers. And hence the confusion to the customer when there is fake counterfeit products mixed up.

Re: Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting

#170

Post by nyolfen »

asdfasdf1233 wrote: post #161
prepend wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is Amazon not actively seeking out patterns of counterfeiters and suggesting this to sellers. Just doing simple image machine learning should get 90% of scammers. He AWS team is great about this. Looking for abnormalities. Looking for posted AWS keys. Proactively. The retail guys need to get some of the cloud guy smarts. Or ethics. Either/or will help stop this. I don’t sell, but I can barely buy from amazon beca…

Amazon is in fact searching for and proactively blocking counterfeiters by using image searching, machine learning, etc. There are literally multiple teams with lots of software engineers working on these problems. Currently entry into brand registry is a requirement for these programs. You would be shocked to see the head count and money Amazon is spending in this area, they are investing heavily.

i'm glad to hear that, and i assume it comes from personal experience, but do you have links to any public information about it?
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