Amazon was accused of plagiarism?! Third-party sellers directly confronted

Yesterday, a large number of foreign media reported that Amazon’s own products were suspected of plagiarizing the product designs of third-party sellers on the platform!

Founded in 2010, Peak Design is a small and medium-sized enterprise that specializes in designing, producing and selling camera accessories. It is well-known in the photography community. In 2017, the company launched an original design new camera bag, the "Everyday Sling", which became one of Peak Design's best-selling camera bags because of its outstanding design.

In addition to its own official website, Peak Design has also entered e-commerce platforms such as Amazon, and has been selling the "Everyday Sling" product on Amazon since the end of 2017. Unexpectedly, at the end of last year, Amazon secretly launched an almost identical camera bag on its own platform, but the price was less than half of the "Everyday Sling".

(Top: Original camera bag, Bottom: Amazon's own camera bag)

Not only do the two products look highly similar, but when the self-operated bag was first put on the shelves, the title read "Amazon Basics Everyday Sling". Later, after being condemned by the brand Peak Design, the title was secretly changed to "Amazon Basics Camera Bag". There is no way to wash away this plagiarism.

Now Peak Design has specially produced a short video to satirize Amazon's plagiarism. It has received 500,000 views on YouTube. After watching the video, a large number of consumers gave bad reviews to Amazon's plagiarized products, which once caused Amazon to ban the comment function of this product.

To be honest, this is not the first time that self-operated products have done this. To be honest, it should be considered a repeat offender. In 2019, we reported an incident in which a self-operated store copied the footwear products of a third-party seller, and also sold them in its own stores at a price far lower than the original product.

However, Peak Design was more provocative in dealing with the plagiarism this time, producing an interesting short film to mobilize consumers to criticize the business giant and teach Amazon a lesson on social media. Amazon did not respond directly to the plagiarism incident, perhaps because the evidence was too conclusive and it had to deal with it coldly.

This also shows that it is difficult for brand sellers to fundamentally ensure that their original products will not be plagiarized. Even Amazon itself will take action against top products, so we small and medium-sized brand sellers must also prepare multiple means to protect our products. Next, I will tell you about Amazon’s popular 0 plan, which is used by sellers to deal with plagiarized and counterfeit products on their own.

All products participating in the Transparency Program will be distributed by Amazon with a unique anti-counterfeiting QR code (charged per product). These QR codes are affixed to the products and become the unique identity of the products. Consumers can scan the code through the app to verify the authenticity of the product, obtain product source and material information, etc.

When Amazon operates warehouses that accept Transparency Program products into the warehouse, they will also verify the QR codes of these products one by one. Products with incorrect or no QR codes will not be able to enter the warehouse.

And if you want to follow-sell a product that has participated in the Transparency Plan, you need to manually enter 5 product anti-counterfeiting codes before you can continue to follow-sell. This eliminates the possibility of people following the sale other than yourself from the root, which is more reasonable than Brand Gating.