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Whilst I'm sure brands will love this ability, let us not lose sight of what this is. Amazon has a responsibility not to sell counterfeit goods, a legal one in
by Zenst 8y ago
Whilst I'm sure brands will love this ability, let us not lose sight of what this is. Amazon has a responsibility not to sell counterfeit goods, a legal one in many countries. What they are doing is in effect offloading their responsibility onto the brands in policing their shop for such counterfeits. Now I'm sure they are not going to totally depend upon this level of counterfeit policing, and customer feedback. But customer feedback does seem to be a driving force for them in identifying counterfeits currently and with this. Are Amazon shifting work they are responsible for onto others for zero pay? For me, it does seem that way, though I hope I'm wrong.
- toss1 8y agoInteresting take. I'd ordinarily be suspicious of similar offloading of work. But in this case, my impression was that each brand owner would be the most knowledgeable & motivated agent in the ecosystem to seek & deactivate the counterfeiters. My biggest concern was that it could empower the brands to abuse the opportunity, and shut down competitors with false allegations of counterfeiting, like the fake DMCA notices for YouTube videos. At least Amazon is saying that they'll be monitoring for this; we'll see how they do. I also thought one of the most important items was buried in the text, a system to send special barcodes identifying product. I'm guessing it would be like a pre-authorization for shipments, so Brand X would send Amazon a database list of IDs tagged to production runs, and they'd send matching barcodes on the actual shipped product. Anything not matching the ID scheme would get rejected. Distributors could send product in with the IDs, and they'd match, counterfeiters would fail to match, even if they knew of the IDs in general. Seems good to me.