Amazon is rife with potentially dangerous counterfeits and other knockoff goods despite years of attempts to crackdown on mis-selling on its platform, a Guardian investigation can reveal.
The global internet giant, which this week revealed that its daily revenues had hit a record $550m (£400m) a day, now spans a huge range of businesses from TV production to web hosting but faces an ongoing challenge to police its own online retail platform.
In one order from the retailer, the Guardian received:
- Knockoff Apple AirPods, mis-sold on the site as genuine items but arriving in packaging labelling them as “HBQ-i7S”.
- Genuine Apple iPhone chargers, sold on the site as new but in reality separated from returned and refurbished devices and sold second-hand.
- Multiple examples of counterfeit streetwear and accessories, including a Supreme/Louis Vuitton iPhone case and an Anti Social Social Club hoodie.
- Counterfeit Kylie Jenner lip gloss, manufactured by a Chinese company and almost indistinguishable from the real thing.
The items were all sold through Amazon’s Marketplace, a long-running feature on the site allowing third parties to use the company’s infrastructure to sell direct to consumers, with Amazon taking a cut of the revenue.
It is an increasingly large part of the company’s business. Marketplace’s $9.2bn revenue in the last quarter accounts for about 20% of Amazon’s total income, and it ships about the same amount of goods as Amazon’s entire online and physical retail operations combined.
Some items, including the counterfeit AirPods, were sold using the “Fulfilled by Amazon” service, which allows independent retailers to ship their products to Amazon, where it stores the items in its own warehouses, uses its own staff to pick and pack them, and ships them using Amazon Prime delivery and Amazon Logistics drivers alongside its own orders.
When contacted by the Guardian, Amazon removed five counterfeit items from sale, and updated the information on the chargers to correctly describe them as used rather than new.
Fighting counterfeits on Amazon Marketplace has been a multi-year project for the company. In 2016, the sandal-maker Birkenstock announced it would stop selling products on the site due to widespread imitations. The German firm was tempted back a year later by the launch of the Amazon “brand registry”, which allows manufacturers to register their own trademarks on the site to gain increased authority over product listings with their brand names.
In a 2016 lawsuit against the former Amazon supplier Mobile Star, Apple described buying more than 100 iPhones, power adapters and lightning cables sold as genuine, to discover that almost 90% of the products were counterfeit. Apple declined to comment for this story. Supreme, Anti Social Social Club, and Kylie Cosmetics did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
In recent years, Amazon has succeeded in limiting some of the most egregious counterfeiting on its platform.
The company said: “Amazon investigated and took action on 95% of all notices of potential infringement received from Brand Registry within eight hours. With our proactive innovations that learn from the information in Brand Registry, brands in Brand Registry on average are finding and reporting 99% fewer suspected infringements than before the launch of Brand Registry.”
But complaints of damaging counterfeiting continue, particularly from smaller manufacturers who cannot provide the staffing required to monitor the site for fakes on Amazon’s behalf.
In early March, ElevationLab, a small iPhone accessory manufacturer, described discovering a counterfeit version of its Anchor headphone dock being sold on Amazon at a price that undercut its own legitimate offering by two cents – and took every resulting sale for five days.
ElevationLab argued that Amazon’s refusal to allow manufacturers the power to impose a blanket ban on third-party sellers “makes them complicit in the rampant counterfeiting on their platform”.
The company’s founder, Casey Hopkins, added: “Amazon can hide behind the fact that independent sellers are doing the counterfeiting (though most people, like my mom, wouldn’t read the fine print of who it’s technically ‘sold by’ – they are just buying from Amazon when they buy something on Amazon).”
The board games manufacturer Asmodee has described similar problems. “We believe for some games that more than 70% of all sales in the US market have been counterfeit,” the company’s North America chief executive, Christian Petersen, said in January.
“There used to be a guy that could open up his trench coat and show you some counterfeit watches in an alley. Now you are getting that counterfeit merchandise under the guise of what seem very, very legitimate sources,” Petersen said. “The legit market simply can’t replicate the price of Chinese-made counterfeit goods selling directly from, for example, [a Fulfilled by Amazon] store in the US.”
The enforcement of counterfeiting is largely considered a civil matter, with intellectual property holders bringing manufacturers and importers to court. Some counterfeits purchased by the Guardian were sold by Amazon sellers based in other countries, making their interception a UK Border Force responsibility.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “Border Force works closely with companies who hold the rights to goods and partner law enforcement agencies to ensure co-ordinated action against those who attempt to import fake merchandise, making regular seizures both of bulk importations and individual counterfeit items.”
A spokesman for the Intellectual Property Office, the government body responsible for co-ordinating intellectual property enforcement, said: “In terms of advice for consumers, the main thing – apart from being aware who you are actually buying from, and looking for the usual indicators that something might be amiss, such as unusually good prices – is to check the platform’s standard process for raising complaints if there is an issue. It’s also worth being aware that this is usually time-bound.”
