Amazon protects brands like Apple and Adidas against the sale of fake products but allows Chinese knock-off merchants to siphon off sales of small producers
- Many small companies rely on Amazon’s algorithms to spot fakes before they appear – but the automated process can be dodged by dedicated scammers
- A small business selling cat products has been constantly battling knock-offs made in China, while major brands don’t face competition from counterfeits
There are two classes of merchant on Amazon.com: those who get special protection from counterfeiters and those who don’t.
The first category includes sellers of some big-name brands, such as Adidas, Apple and even Amazon itself. They benefit from digital fortifications that prevent unauthorised sellers from listing certain products for sale.
Many lesser-known brands belong to the second group and have no such shield. A popular cat toy called the Ripple Rug, invented by Fred Ruckel, is one of those brands. A few months ago, knock-off merchants based in China began selling versions of his product, siphoning off tens of thousands of US dollars in sales.
Amazon’s marketplace has long been plagued with fakes, a scourge that has concerned bosses at household names like Nike. While most items can be uploaded freely to the site, by 2016 Amazon began requiring would-be sellers of a select group of products to get permission to list them, a system that has been called “brand gating”.
Of the millions of products sold on Amazon, marketing advisers say only a small proportion, perhaps thousands, are afforded this kind of protection and the programme is not publicised.