Can Amazon And Its Marketplace Rivals Fix Their Counterfeits Problem?

Since Amazon first created the Marketplace to take on eBay, the e-tailer has brought into its fold and onto its website millions of third-party sellers. By 2016, third-party goods accounted for half of all merchandise sold through the site. Credit Suisse has put Marketplace’s sales at $135 billion, and that could expand $259 billion by 2020, according to figures cited in Entrepreneur magazine. That’s a lot of stuff. It’s a massive river of stuff, as the company’s name aspires to. And into that massive river of goods, by many accounts, pours a steady stream of counterfeits and knockoffs. As attorneys for Daimler AG, owner of the Mercedes-Benz brand, said in an October suit against Amazon, “Amazon sells and/or facilitates the sale of an exorbitant number of counterfeit and infringing goods” because of the “lack of effective regulation.” Amazon has a strict anti-counterfeit policy and has recently taken new steps to address the issue. And its third-party platform certainly isn’t the only one that has been infested with fakes. Investigators have long decried the problem on eBay, too, and Alibaba is famous for the problem — Jack Ma even acknowledged counterfeits were the “cancer” of the Chinese e-commerce site. Read more at Retail Dive.