Amazon Anti-Counterfeiting Exchange Necessary But Not Sufficient

Since there were marketplaces, counterfeiters and thieves have been trying to make a quick buck from them due to the liquidity it enables.

Recently Amazon launched an Anti-Counterfeiting Exchange (ACX) to help share information between brands, retailers, and distributors on counterfeiters acting in the marketplace across multiple outlets. The hope is that through coordinated information sharing, more patterns can emerge, and counterfeit actors that might have been in the shadows before can be taken down more quickly.

Look, anyone who has sold on Amazon for more than 5 minutes realizes there is counterfeit, fraudulent, and stolen merchandise in every category.

In fairness, Amazon does take things down but it can be extremely painful at best and "too little too late" at worst. Sometimes, Amazon can't win because a competitor reports you as counterfeit, and a legitimate business gets taken down. False positives can be almost as bad as false negatives.

Ultimately, retail theft and counterfeiting is not new. That said, with the ease and automation of online, it's turbocharged. An endless game of whack-a-mole where there are millions of fraudsters and only the algorithms to learn patterns to keep up. (Humans play a part, but can only do so much at the scale we are at).

The cynical read on the situation says that Amazon got the memo when the Dept of Homeland Security said in 2020 that private industry needs to do more about counterfeiters. Better to get ahead of the Federal Government targeting Amazon in their crosshairs for enabling counterfeiters without established leadership in industry-wide information sharing. Although, it follows the launch of the Counterfeit Crimes Unit at Amazon in the past few years -- Amazon does these programs to get ahead of the legal and PR narrative. No question.

The positive read is what else are we going to do? Better to eliminate the information silos than not; the industry could use a place to start; and the information will help Amazon.

This Exchange is the 2.0 version of the Counterfeit Crimes Unit and reads to me almost like a "tipster" line for that unit as well. How do we get faster at this? More data, more inputs, better pattern-matching, better results.

Every brand has a reason to partner with Amazon on this program, simply because Amazon is the most liquid market: your goods will end up there, period.

From a brand-owner point of view, here's hoping this is helpful.