3 ms·

How practical is it really? Having to print and track individually serialized barcodes for every product you sell, sounds like it can be anything from a nearly

How practical is it really? Having to print and track individually serialized barcodes for every product you sell, sounds like it can be anything from a nearly 0 cost step to a complete logistical nightmare depending on the manufacturing process.

danesparza 7y ago
How badly are you being counterfeited and how much do you want to avoid lost sales?
- throwaway_tech 7y ago
  Enough to sue Amazon for facilitating and profiting off the sale of products infringing on my IP, but not enough to pay Amazon to police their own platform. Policing Amazon's platform is Amazon's job and is a cost Amazon should bear. I don't have to pay Walmart for them to not sell products infringing on my IP, they do that on their own and when they fail, they are liable for my damages. Example, my Dad published an e-book he sells through Amazon, and I'll be damned if there aren't other Amazon sellers offering my Dad's book for sale...its ridiculous.
  - F00bart 7y ago
    I think most people are simply ignorant of the sheer volume of transactions of counterfeit goods on Amazon and similar platforms. The platforms benefit from each transaction regardless, so the platforms often evolve to encourage volume, nothing else.
fredley 7y ago
In order to not be trivially defeatable, it sounds quite hard. You can't, for example, use sequential blocks of ids — far too easy for a counterfeiter to reverse-engineer valid ranges. Which means that you either generate them through some cryptographic signing process - non trivial and the risk of compromised keys, or just generate random guids centrally meaning there's a request/response somewhere in the production cycle to get ids, or batches of ids - also non trivial. The whole thing sounds like it's a really obvious and simple solution at a glance, but as you dig into it it seems hard, especially for smaller players, and only shifts the counterfeiters' workload (now you need to figure out how to steal barcodes, not impossible depending on how much money you invest).
- arkitaip 7y ago
  Countless solutions have tried to solve the problem of counterfeit goods by using some kind of unique identifier but I don't know of any that has seen widespread usage. The difference is that Amazon is exceptional at tech and has the marketplace to implement and improve their solution over many years. Hopefully Amazon's solution becomes cheap and easy to use for even small brands (but realistically it only needs to be less expensive than the cost of counterfeits to be adopted). If Amazon's Transparency is REALLY GOOD, they could offer it as a service through AWS. There's an enormous demand for this sort of solution.
- sudhirj 7y ago
  The article says each SKU gets its own codes (and my understanding is that Amazon maintains SKU metadata internally and all resellers sell against it). My guess would be a variation of skuUUID:itemUUID:sha1(skuUUID+itemUUID+skuSecret), encoded as a QR code. UUID could be a smaller int ID, hash could be a base64 encode if you need to save space.

danesparza 7y ago

How badly are you being counterfeited and how much do you want to avoid lost sales?

throwaway_tech 7y ago
Enough to sue Amazon for facilitating and profiting off the sale of products infringing on my IP, but not enough to pay Amazon to police their own platform. Policing Amazon's platform is Amazon's job and is a cost Amazon should bear. I don't have to pay Walmart for them to not sell products infringing on my IP, they do that on their own and when they fail, they are liable for my damages. Example, my Dad published an e-book he sells through Amazon, and I'll be damned if there aren't other Amazon sellers offering my Dad's book for sale...its ridiculous.
- F00bart 7y ago
  I think most people are simply ignorant of the sheer volume of transactions of counterfeit goods on Amazon and similar platforms. The platforms benefit from each transaction regardless, so the platforms often evolve to encourage volume, nothing else.

fredley 7y ago

In order to not be trivially defeatable, it sounds quite hard. You can't, for example, use sequential blocks of ids — far too easy for a counterfeiter to reverse-engineer valid ranges. Which means that you either generate them through some cryptographic signing process - non trivial and the risk of compromised keys, or just generate random guids centrally meaning there's a request/response somewhere in the production cycle to get ids, or batches of ids - also non trivial. The whole thing sounds like it's a really obvious and simple solution at a glance, but as you dig into it it seems hard, especially for smaller players, and only shifts the counterfeiters' workload (now you need to figure out how to steal barcodes, not impossible depending on how much money you invest).

arkitaip 7y ago
Countless solutions have tried to solve the problem of counterfeit goods by using some kind of unique identifier but I don't know of any that has seen widespread usage. The difference is that Amazon is exceptional at tech and has the marketplace to implement and improve their solution over many years. Hopefully Amazon's solution becomes cheap and easy to use for even small brands (but realistically it only needs to be less expensive than the cost of counterfeits to be adopted). If Amazon's Transparency is REALLY GOOD, they could offer it as a service through AWS. There's an enormous demand for this sort of solution.
sudhirj 7y ago
The article says each SKU gets its own codes (and my understanding is that Amazon maintains SKU metadata internally and all resellers sell against it). My guess would be a variation of skuUUID:itemUUID:sha1(skuUUID+itemUUID+skuSecret), encoded as a QR code. UUID could be a smaller int ID, hash could be a base64 encode if you need to save space.