Amazon Introduces Self-Service Counterfeit Solution
Undoubtedly, Amazon is a great place to list your brand’s products in front of millions of purchase-ready consumers to generate high-volume sales. However, since Amazon is a marketplace, anyone can list products on the site—even your brand’s counterfeiters. Until recently, managing counterfeit products on Amazon has been a bit of a hurdle with enrollments into Brand Registry (and, if you’re lucky, Amazon’s Brand Gating program).
Introducing Amazon Project Zero
In Q1’2019, Amazon introduced Project Zero, a self-service solution designed to bring more transparency and put more power in marketers’ hands to better manage their brand’s counterfeit listings and products.
This new solution can be summarized by three core features:
- Automated Protections: By providing your brand’s key identifiers—trademarks and logos—with Amazon’s machine learning, Amazon will crawl 5 billion daily listings to identify suspected counterfeits at scale.
- Self-Service Counterfeit Removal: Brands now have the ability to flag items for counterfeit and get them removed. Keep in mind, it looks like Amazon will be policing these removals to ensure that brands aren’t removing items maliciously. By monitoring this process, it also keeps the integrity of the program and product listings.
- Product Serialization: From there, brands can take this a step further by adding a unique code on every item they create. These unique codes will be used to scan items to confirm their authenticity and protect the brand’s integrity.
To be noted, Automated Protections and Self-Service Counterfeit Removal are free once enrolled. Product Serialization will carry with it an additional charge from $0.01-$0.05 per unit, and these fees appear to be based on total volume.
What This Means for Amazon Retailers
This is super exciting for Amazon retailers—especially those who have had experience with large scale counterfeiters. By managing counterfeit products, brands will be able to:
- Protect their sales
- Maintain Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) accross unauthorized sellers
- Guarantee customers receive authentic products
Rise recommends taking advantage of Amazon’s Project Zero and testing what it can do for a brand’s counterfeit problems. Right now, the solution is open; all that’s needed to get started is filling out a form and joining the waitlist.
Contact Rise today if you’d like our Amazon experts to help manage your Amazon programs.