How Brands Can Use Amazon’s Project Zero to Defend Against Counterfeiters

What Is Project Zero?

Over the last year, there has been ongoing dialogue about the concern of counterfeit products across various online marketplaces, including but not limited to Amazon, AliExpress, Wish, eBay, and Walmart. In recent news, the White House issued a memorandum on counterfeit and pirated goods, which emphasizes the importance of intellectual property rights and formally announces an expanded effort by the federal government to combat online counterfeit trafficking.

In February of 2019, Amazon launched Project Zero, an invite-only program that “leverages the combined strengths of Amazon and brands to drive counterfeits to zero.” The program integrates three innovative tools that were designed to enable brands to protect their intellectual property and detect counterfeits, which are outlined below.

Through the three tools, and reinforcement of their Brand Registry, Amazon is providing brands with tools to help monitor for fraudulent listings and protect their authentic products.

Key Features of the Program

• Automated protections: Brands provide Amazon with their logos, trademarks, and other critical data about their brand, and they scan over five billion product listing updates each day, leveraging machine-learning algorithms to search for suspected counterfeits that can proactively be removed.
• Self-service counterfeit removal tool: With this tool, brands are equipped to remove counterfeit listings themselves. Previously, brands had to report a counterfeit to Amazon, and the company would then investigate the reports and take action in a timely manner. To save time, brands can directly control and remove counterfeit listings themselves.
• Product serialization: The service provides a unique code for every unit that is manufactured, and the brand then puts these codes on its products during the manufacturing process. Each time a product using Amazon’s serialization service is ordered on Amazon, the company scans and verifies the item-level authenticity to detect and prevent counterfeiting before it reaches a customer. Brands that choose to use the serialization service will incur a cost of $0.01 and $0.05 per unit, based on volume.

How to Join and Next Steps

Designed to enable you to remove counterfeit listings without ever having to contact Amazon, Project Zero leverages product-level data and machine-learning to effectively scan the marketplace for potential counterfeits and remove them in advance.

While the program is currently invitation-only, you should join the waitlist and Amazon will reach out when they are ready for you to enroll. In order to be eligible once Amazon reaches out, you need to be enrolled in Amazon’s Brand Registry and have a government-registered trademark.