Amazon Releases Second Brand Protection Report

In June, Amazon released its second Brand Protection Report, describing the results of its activities to ensure authenticity of goods sold in its store, and to fight bad actors.

The report describes how, in 2021, Amazon invested more than $900 million and 12,000 people – including machine learning scientists, software developers, and expert investigators – into developing tools for protecting customers, brands, and selling partners, from counterfeit, fraud, and other forms of abuse.

As a result of these efforts, Amazon succeeded in stopping more than 2.5 million bad actors from creating fraudulent selling accounts, thereby preventing them from publishing a single product for sale.

The e-commerce giant was also able to identify, seize, and appropriately dispose of more than 3 million counterfeit products. This included counterfeits sent to Amazon’s fulfilment centres, and situations where Amazon worked with brands and law enforcement to find counterfeiters’ warehouses and facilities, and get them shut down.

These impressive results were in large part due to an increase in brand owners’ adoption of Amazon’s brand protection tools, including:

Brand Registry – launched in 2017, Brand Registry gives brands the ability to manage and protect their brand and intellectual property rights on Amazon. Through the ‘Report a Violation’ tool, brands can search for, identify, report infringements and subsequently track their submissions within a dedicated dashboard.

Brand Registry also allows Amazon to more effectively safeguard brands through automated protections that leverage machine learning and the data provided by brands in the registry (eg. trademarks, logos). Amazon’s automated protections continuously scan its stores to identify potentially infringing products.

In 2021, the number of brands enrolled in the registry grew to more than 700,000 active brands, an increase of 40% from the prior year. At the same time, the average number of valid notices of infringement submitted to Amazon by a brand in Brand Registry decreased by 25% from the prior year, as continued growth in the adoption and efficacy of automated brand protection tools continued to reduce the number of issues that brands were able to find and report.

Transparency – a product serialisation service where brands label every single unit of a selected product with a unique 2D code, which is verified by Amazon before shipping the product to customers.

In 2021, Transparency enrolled more than 23,000 brands globally, an increase of 35% compared to 2020, and enabled the protection of more than 750 million product units, a 50% increase versus 2020.

Also in 2021, Amazon launched Transparency’s track and trace service, allowing brands to trace products in their distribution channels and access enhanced analytics on customer returns. This service helps brands visualise trends in product defects at a factory or manufacturing lot level and fix root causes.