Amazon's proactive anti-counterfeiting work is good news for brands - statistics from the 2023 Brand Protection Report

Amazon's annual Brand Protection Report was released this week, detailing the work done in 2023 to tackle infringement on its platforms. 

The statistics are impressive yet again, with some highlights being:

• In 2023, Amazon stopped more than 700,000 attempts by bad actors to create new selling accounts before any products were listed for sale. This is down from 6 million attempts to create infringing accounts in 2020, and 800,000 attempts in 2022. Amazon's preventative work here is clearly having a ongoing deterrent effect;
• The proactive measures used by Amazon were successful in blocking more than 99% of potentially infringing listings without the need for brand owners to intervene and file complaints; 
• The total number of infringement notices submitted by brands to Amazon has therefore decreased by more than 30% since 2020 (despite the total number of products available for sale on Amazon continuing to increase during the same time period); 
• The Amazon Counterfeit Crimes Unit seized and disposed of more than 7 million counterfeit products worldwide in 2023; 
• There are now more than 1.6 billion product units enrolled in the Transparency product serialisation scheme.

One of the key things I've taken away from this year's report is that Amazon's proactive work in blocking potentially infringing listings and seller accounts has seemingly lead to a corresponding decrease in the number of infringement notices that brands have had to file.  

Brand owners will surely be grateful for a reduction in the amount of work required to remove infringing content from the world's largest online marketplace. Filing complaints against counterfeit listings can feel like a never-ending game of “whack-a-mole”, so the fact that the Amazon's internal mechanisms have demonstrably reduced not only the number of infringing listings requiring intervention, but also the number of seller accounts created by bad actors, will surely be a welcome relief to many.