Amazon: 4B bad listings prevented last year

Amazon, which has been under increasing pressure to tackle counterfeit products, said in its second-annual report that it prevented 4 billion bad listings from making it onto its site and got rid of more than 3 million phony products last year.

The results, released Wednesday, were mixed compared with 2020, when Amazon blocked 10 billion listings and got rid of 2 million phony products. The Seattle-based e-commerce juggernaut also saw a decrease in complaints of intellectual property infringement in 2021 while growing the number of active brands on its site.

According to the report, Amazon stopped more than 2.5 million attempts to create fake accounts on its third-party marketplace, where sellers can list their products directly to consumers. That number is about a 58% decline from the attempts it said it stopped in 2020, which the company credits to its vetting process and other efforts to deter bad actors.

But Juozas Kaziukenas, the founder of e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse, said it can be hard to independently know what actually caused those declines — whether it’s Amazon’s policies or other factors.

Counterfeit sellers have long plagued Amazon and other e-commerce retailers, including eBay. And Amazon has stepped up efforts to fight the problem in recent years amid heightened scrutiny from brands and lawmakers pushing for anti-counterfeit legislation.

Amazon backs a House version of an online retail bill that would require online marketplaces to collect contact and financial information from high-volume sellers and disclose some of the information to consumers. Amazon had opposed an earlier Senate version of the bill, which would require online retailers to gather information from a larger group of thirdparty merchants.

Amazon said it implemented a program last year that made it harder for bad actors to register for selling accounts by requiring one-on-one conversations with a company team member to verify their identity.