Amazon, which has been under increasing pressure to tackle counterfeit products, says that it prevented 4 billion bad listings from making it onto its site in 2021 and got rid of more than 3 million phony products.
The Seattle-based e-commerce juggernaut also saw a decrease in complaints of intellectual property infringement in 2021 while growing the number of active brands on its site.
According to the report, Amazon stopped more than 2.5 million attempts to create fake accounts on its third-party marketplace, where sellers can list their products directly to consumers.
But Juozas Kaziukėnas, the founder of e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse, said it can be hard to independently know what actually caused those declines — whether it's Amazon's policies or other factors.
Counterfeit sellers have long plagued Amazon and other e-commerce retailers, including eBay. And Amazon has stepped up efforts to fight it in recent years amid heightened scrutiny from brands and lawmakers pushing for anti-counterfeit legislation.
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Amazon backs a US House version of an online retail bill, known as the Inform Act, which would require online marketplaces to collect contact and financial information from high-volume sellers and disclose some of the information to consumers.
Amazon had opposed an earlier Senate version of the bill, which would require online retailers to gather information from a larger group of third-party merchants.
Meanwhile, TechNet, a lobbying group that counts Amazon and eBay as some of its members, is pushing back against another bill that would make the e-commerce platforms liable for counterfeit goods sold on their site.
Amazon says it spent c.$900m to push back against fraud, and sued or referred over 600 sellers for investigation in the US and other places like China.
According to Marketplace Pulse, the share of top China-based merchants has steadily been declining on Amazon's third-party marketplace since late 2020, a trend some experts believe may be caused by pandemic-induced supply chain snafus and the company's recent efforts to crack down on prohibited activity, including fake reviews.
Last year, the company suspended several prominent China-based sellers and reportedly kicked off 50,000 merchants for violating its rules.
+Additional reporting AP
