Amazon appears to be getting serious about ridding its site of fake goods

By Trevor Mogg November 15, 2016

Amazon HQ — Ken Wolter / Shutterstock

Amazon is stepping up efforts to purge its site of fake goods, an immense task considering the vast size of its sprawling site filled with products from an expanding global network of third-party sellers.

The ecommerce giant is so determined to clean up its online store that it’s hit the courts, this week filing lawsuits that for the first time go after sellers allegedly offering counterfeit products to customers, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The legal documents – filed in a Washington court on Monday – state than when customers buy fake products from the online retail site, “it undermines the trust that customers, sellers and manufacturers place in Amazon, thereby tarnishing Amazon’s brand and causing irreparable reputational harm.”

One of the suits focuses on a number of outlets that have allegedly been selling fake Forearm Forklift straps for moving heavy loads. The California-based company recently appeared in a CNBC feature about how its business has been “ravaged over the past half-decade by counterfeiters, mostly selling on Amazon.” It was even claimed last month that an incredible 90 percent of items sold on Amazon as genuine Apple products are actually fake.

In other efforts to rid the site of counterfeiters and their phony goods, Amazon has recently begun demanding invoices from new sellers of particular brands to prove that the products are coming from legitimate sources.

Amazon says it invests heavily in systems designed to weed out bogus items and bans the sellers from the site whenever it identifies them.

The legal action against sellers of counterfeit goods follows other recent lawsuits from Amazon that targeted companies creating fake online reviews for merchants. The Seattle-based behemoth has even sent its lawyers after some of the merchants who create or buy those fake reviews in the hope of deterring others from becoming involved in the underhand behavior.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Contributing Editor

Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…

News

Amazon juiced its search algorithm to sell its own products over competitors’

Amazon Basics

Amazon has reportedly been adjusting its search system so that products that are more profitable for the company appear higher in search results than those that it receives a smaller profit from.
The Wall Street Journal spoke to people who claimed they worked on optimizing Amazon’s secret algorithm so that search results displayed items that boosted profitability for the company over the most-relevant or best-selling product for a particular search term.
Amazon sales can often make or break a product, so the adjustment could have dramatically hurt businesses that had no way of beating the algorithm's suggestions.
In an emailed statement to the WSJ, Amazon denied the claims, stating that it had not tweaked its algorithm to rank search results based on profitability; however, it declined to discuss the inner workings of the algorithm. An Amazon spokesperson told Digital Trends that the company has not changed its search algorithm to boost more profitable products.
"We feature the products customers will want, regardless of whether they are our own brands or products offered by our selling partners," the spokesperson said in a statement. "As any store would do, we consider the profitability of the products we list and feature on the site, but it is just one metric and not in any way a key driver of what we show customers."
The people who claimed to work on the project said that they do not know how much the algorithm impacts Amazon’s sales. However, Amazon's private-label brand, known as AmazonBasics, asked to have improved listings in the search algorithm.
The news comes as some lawmakers are looking at rethinking antitrust laws specifically with technology companies in mind.
In July the Justice Department announced that it was opening a broad antitrust review into Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple regarding Big Tech's dominance in internet search, social media, and retail.
As part of that investigation, the government said it planned to look into “whether and how market-leading online platforms have achieved market power and are engaging in practices that have reduced competition, stifled innovation, or otherwise harmed consumers.”
The news about Amazon comes just a week after a similar story regarding Apple’s App Store surfaced.
According to The New York Times, Apple favored its own apps in search over those made by third parties, a move that potentially led to download numbers for Apple-owned apps growing considerably higher than those made by other companies. In some cases, search terms would show as many as 14 Apple apps before showing one made by anyone else, with the exception of apps that had paid Apple for advertising.
Apple acknowledged the issue and said that it has tweaked its algorithm so that fewer Apple apps appear as top search results within the store

Smart Home

Amazon is about to kill off its press-to-order Dash button

amazon ramps up dash button integration explainer header

Amazon’s Dash buttons are about to become little more than small household ornaments after the company announced it's going to disconnect them from the internet.

In a statement to Digital Trends, the online shopping giant said it would switch off the press-to-order buttons on August 31.

Entertainment

Confused Christian group petitions Netflix to cancel Amazon’s Good Omens

The two main characters from Good Omens looking at one another, one in a black suit, one in white.

Good Omens - Official Trailer | Prime Video

In a case of "yell at the biggest guy in the room" confusion, viewers upset about Good Omens, Neil Gaiman's satirical send-up of Christianity (and religion in general), are petitioning Netflix to get the series canceled. The only issue? They're petitioning the wrong streaming service.