Amazon blocked 4 bn bad listings in 2021: Director-global brand relations

Amazon's automated technology scanned over 8 billion attempted changes to product detail pages daily for signs of potential abuse, compared to more than 5 billion in 2020

As director of global brand relations at Amazon, Anna Dalla Val’s role is to fight the battle against counterfeit products at the e-commerce giant. She leads a global team dedicated to working with brands, industry associations, government regulators, and law enforcement to advance Amazon’s brand protection program.

At a time when Amazon, has been under increasing pressure to tackle counterfeit products, Val said that the company has prevented 4 billion bad listings from making it onto its site last year. It also got rid of more than 3 million fake goods last year compared to over 2 million in 2020.

“Amazon’s automated technology scanned more than 8 billion attempted changes to product detail pages daily for signs of potential abuse, (compared to more than 5 billion in 2020),” said Val in an interview. “Amazon blocked more than 4 billion bad listings before they were listed in our store.”

The firm also revealed these insights through its second Brand Protection Report, which highlights Amazon’s commitment to the authenticity of goods sold in its store and to fighting bad actors.

The challenge is huge. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimates that pirated and counterfeit products make up 2.5 per cent of world trade—that’s $464 billion a year.

“That’s roughly the gross domestic product of Belgium,” said Val. “Counterfeit (products) deprive the brand owners, of the value of their intellectual property. Our common objective is ensuring that our customers are protected from counterfeit.”

An alumnus of Columbia University Law School, Val, prior to joining Amazon, served as VP and global head of intellectual property at New York-based fashion brand Ralph Lauren.

Amazon and its millions of selling partners—the vast majority of which are small and medium-sized businesses—serve hundreds of millions of customers worldwide. Customers expect that when they purchase an item in Amazon’s store, sold either by Amazon or by one of its third-party selling partners, they will receive an authentic product.

In 2021, Amazon invested more than $900 million and had more than 12,000 people—including machine learning scientists, software developers, and expert investigators—who were dedicated to protecting customers, brands, selling partners, and their store from counterfeit, fraud, and other forms of abuse. A significant number of people from India are also part of such teams at the company.

“We really use a combination of machine learning and expert human review,” said Val. “Counterfeiters are relentless and try to circumvent our protection. For example, once machine learning is good at detecting infringing products in the images, the counterfeiters started pixelating the images to try and avoid detection. And that's where we continue to scale and improve our machine learning to tackle this new type of abuse.”

Val said that Amazon is scaling up the protection and technology globally as well as in India to identify those trends and learn from them. Amazon stopped more than 2.5 million attempts to create fraudulent selling accounts, preventing these bad actors from publishing a single product for sale, according to the report. This is down from more than 6 million attempts the prior year, thanks to the robust seller and product vetting, along with efforts to hold bad actors accountable that are deterring them from attempting to sell on Amazon.

There is increasing adoption of brand protection tools. Brand Registry, which unlocks a suite of tools to build and protect a brand on Amazon, grew to include more than 700,000 active brands, an increase of 40 per cent 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 per cent from the prior year, as continued growth in the adoption and efficacy of automated brand protection tools continue to reduce the number of issues that brands are able to find and report.

“We have built industry-leading tools and I am really pleased to share that they're all available in India,” said Val.

Amazon is also forging Public-Private Partnerships. It published a blueprint for public and private sector partnerships to stop counterfeiters, building on learning and progress in protecting Amazon’s store.

In India, the consumer affairs ministry reportedly has raised concerns with Amazon related to improving customer services, including complaint redressal as well as selling genuine products. The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) which represents about 70 million traders in the country has also been writing to the ministry to ensure that fake goods are not sold online and consumer rights are protected.

When asked how Amazon is addressing such issues in India, Val said the company is partnering with a lot of industry associations and the Indian government to share the information.

“In India specifically, we signed memoranda of understanding (MoU)with leading industry associations, like the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCCI), the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the Indian Beauty and Hygiene Association (IBHA),” said Val. “We have worked together to exchange information and conducted sessions to talk about tools and policy.”

Amazon said its Counterfeit Crimes Unit (CCU) continued to focus on ensuring that counterfeiters are held accountable—stopping them from abusing Amazon’s stores and those of other retailers across the industry.

In 2021, Amazon’s CCU, filed civil litigation against more than 170 counterfeiters in U.S. courts. It sued or referred more than 600 criminals for investigation in the U.S., UK, EU, and China, an increase of more than 300 per cent over 2020.

In 2021, Amazon identified, seized, and appropriately disposed of more than 3 million counterfeit products, preventing them from harming customers or being resold elsewhere in the retail supply chain. This includes counterfeits that were 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 to shut down.