OVER two million items for sale on Amazon and found to be fakes or non-existent were deleted by the company's anti-fraud team in 2020 alone, according to its Brand Protection Report, and a handful of firms apparently bribing members of the public to give fake five-star reviews have had the plug pulled on them and can no longer be found if they are searched for.
The global online retail chain invested over US$700 million and employed more than 10,000 people to trace knock-off goods, false reviews and sellers purporting to be genuine but merely taking money and not sending the products out.
Deputy chairman of Worldwide Customer Trust and Partner Support, Dharmesh Mehta, says the idea is to protect not only customers, but also brands and Marketplace sellers.
“We've helped our partners keep their businesses open and, despite the rise in attempted fraud, we've managed to guarantee that our customers can buy with confidence from our vast selection of genuine brands,” Mehta says.
The process is proactive, not waiting for customers to get caught out and report the matter before intervening – stringent pre-registration checks meant over six million attempts to create fraudulent seller profiles and more than 10 billion suspect product descriptions were traced and blocked before they even made it onto the site.
Amazon works with powerful tools to detect forged labels, such as the Brand Registry, Transparency and Project Zero, which enable its own technology to combine with those of sellers and includes a specialist unit for reporting forgery or fake sales attempts to the relevant authorities in the country concerned.
Through this Forgery Crime Unit, Amazon can and will prosecute, and takes legal action in its own name, on behalf of Marketplace sellers, or jointly.
How does this help Spanish traders?
Just before Christmas, Barcelona's mayoress Ada Colau urged residents: “Don't buy from Amazon, buy from your local shops.”
To which Amazon responded that it supports over 2,000 local shops and other traders in the city alone, enabling them to sell to a wider, even international, customer base than they otherwise would by merely having a physical shop and relying upon passing trade.
Local, family-run, small and medium-sized shops and other businesses throughout Spain have been able to go from selling purely to people living close by to actually exporting their wares by registering with Amazon, whose presence in Spain has never stopped growing since it 'landed' in the country a decade ago.
At present, non-Prime customers nationwide can get free delivery for orders over €29 or on book orders over €19 where these are fulfilled by Amazon, and elsewhere, national deliveries can cost as little as 99 cents.
And many of these firms say they were suffering as a result of fake goods being sold bearing their brands until Amazon launched its 10,000-strong fraud detection team.
One of these is DELUXE 13, a Spanish firm specialising in health and wellbeing equipment, selling to companies and individuals.
Everything from treadmills to orthopaedic mattresses, massage armchairs to portable ozone-generators and air-purifiers, which go through 'rigorous quality control' before hitting the market, goods sold by DELUXE 13 were among the many which used to be forged and their prices drastically undercut by illegal sales practices before Amazon started its crusade.
As a result of that crusade, says Cerro Ruiz, all of these illicit practices have stopped dead – and his company's sales figures have soared by over 30% in the past year.
Thanks to the Transparency tool, customers who mistrusted the firm as they believed they were buying poor-quality or non-genuine goods from them directly, when they were in fact buying them from an illegal seller, can now be confident they are getting the genuine article; also, potential buyers are not lured away by inferior imitations at considerably lower prices, erroneously leading them to believe they are getting a 'bargain' elsewhere.
