Dive Brief:

• Amazon unveiled a new information-sharing platform Thursday aimed at helping retailers track counterfeiters and stop sales of online fakes.
• Dubbed the Anti-Counterfeiting Exchange (ACX), the e-commerce giant described the platform as “an industry collaboration” designed to make it more difficult for counterfeiters to “move among different stores to attempt to sell their counterfeit goods.”
• Amazon said it has already found hundreds of instances through ACX where the same counterfeiter tried to create accounts on Amazon and at least one other store operator.

Dive Insight:

Counterfeit goods have long dogged Amazon and other online marketplaces, which rely on a vast pool of sellers to procure products and sell goods through their own independent businesses. Amazon’s massive stable of nearly two million sellers makes its website a money-making machine, and also incredibly difficult to vet for bad actors.

For years, a chorus of brands large and small voiced frustration against Amazon over the proliferation of fakes, in some cases taking legal action. The American Apparel & Footwear association even pushed for Amazon’s platform to be listed by the U.S. Trade Representative as a “notorious market” for counterfeits. (The trade office in past years has included some of Amazon’s overseas websites on the list, sparking pushback from Amazon.)

Since launching its Brand Registry in 2017, Amazon says it has stopped 800,000 “bad actor attempts” at creating new selling accounts through its platform and identified six million counterfeit items. Over the years, Amazon has also teamed up with brands to pursue counterfeiters in court.

ACX represents a front in the battle against counterfeits. Users on the platform can share information about confirmed counterfeiters with each other, and a third-party anonymizes access for participants sharing and receiving information.

Amazon said in a press release that “participants can identify and stop perpetrators more quickly than they would in the absence of this collaborative data sharing.” Users can learn immediately when one of their peers has flagged a counterfeiter and make decisions independently about whether to stop using the seller in their store.

“This is an opening salvo in a much larger battle against counterfeiters and criminal organizations, and the effort will need even greater participation, from all industries and sectors, to reach its full potential,” James Mancuso, director of the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center — a government entity led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — said in a statement included in Amazon’s announcement.

Amazon said it has been working with ACX members to pilot and ensure guardrails of the exchange. It ultimately hopes to “design a scalable way to broaden participation to additional companies," and released an open invitation to other retailers and marketplace operators to join the program.