Amazon has released its annual Brand Protection Report for 2022.
The statistics reported this year continue to impress and demonstrate Amazon's continuing efforts to tackle counterfeits. The figures also show that these efforts are working - for example, Amazon reports that the number of bad faith attempts to create new selling accounts has decreased by over 50% year on year since 2020 - there were 6 million attempts in 2020, 2.5 million in 2021 and only 800,000 reported attempts in 2022. Given the number of reports highlighting the vast scale of the global counterfeiting trade, it is reassuring to see that the work of the largest e-commerce company is yielding results.
Some of the highlights of the report are as follows:
- Amazon's continuous monitoring service scans 8 billion listings daily and 99% of listings that were blocked or removed on the grounds of being fraudulent, infringing or counterfeit were identified proactively before a brand owner had to report them;
- As a result of the protection mechanisms available to brand owners via the Brand Registry, Amazon reports a 35% reduction in the total number of infringement notices submitted by brands compared to 2021;
- Amazon's partnership with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has enabled them to identify and remove over 5000 false or abusive brands and prevent them from enrolling in the Brand Registry program. Amazon reports that it acts on information from the USPTO to ensure that fraudulent trade mark applications and registrations do not enable bad actors to enrol on the Brand Registry. This will help to prevent false infringement claims by bad actors, as discussed in my previous article.
- The number of brands enrolled with the Transparency program increased by over 40% in 2022 and Transparency product serialisation protected over 900 million product units;
- The Amazon Counterfeit Crimes Unit (CCU) pursued more than 1300 criminals through litigation and criminal referrals in 2022 (often in collaboration with big name brands such as Cartier and WWE as discussed in my previous article) and took more than 6 million counterfeit products out of the supply chain;
- Ahead of the 2022 holiday shopping season, Amazon's partnership with the US Chamber of Commerce and the US Customs and Border Protection to provide information to over 70 million people in relation to counterfeit products.
We are proud of the progress we have made this past year, and we will continue to invest and innovate until we drive counterfeits to zero in our store. We also appreciate the growing industrywide partnership and collaboration in the fight against counterfeiting. While the industry still has a long way to go in driving the right public and private sector partnerships, we are excited about our progress and what we can do together to hold bad actors accountable to ensure the entire industry is rid of counterfeits.
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