Publish illegal seller data?! Amazon starts cracking down again

Recently, it has become very popular in the cross-border circle to complain about Amazon's no-source model. This method of transferring products from 1688 in batches to Amazon for sale can easily be caught for infringement or selling counterfeit goods, resulting in the store being closed and the early investment being wasted.

However, starting this year, Amazon will not just shut down stores that are found to be selling knockoff counterfeit products. Amazon is planning a new policy to crack down on counterfeit goods, which will directly hand over information about sellers who are selling counterfeit goods to law enforcement agencies.

Counterfeit goods/infringement is Amazon's next focus

In the past month, Amazon has suffered two major setbacks due to the negative impact of counterfeit goods. One is the " Nike's complete withdrawal from the Amazon platform " that we sellers are more familiar with, and the other is Trump's criticism of Amazon as a "hotbed of counterfeit products" and even expressed his intention to include Amazon in the list of Notorious Markets.

Counterfeit and infringement issues have always been a headache for Amazon. Fake sellers are like weeds, burning out for a while and then coming back again. Now the loss of reputation and public opinion caused by counterfeit and infringement products to Amazon has far exceeded the commission and advertising income. After weighing the pros and cons, it is inevitable for Amazon to crack down on counterfeiting.

In the past, Amazon’s practice was to directly remove the sales rights of stores that sold counterfeit and infringing products based on algorithm capture or when receiving reports of selling counterfeit and infringing products. It was also extremely difficult to appeal, and for many sellers, even writing an action plan was of no avail.

Even with such a strong crackdown, the situation of selling counterfeit goods and infringing copyright has not improved. The key is that as a platform, the heaviest punishment for Amazon is to close the store. If we want to truly reduce the situation of selling counterfeit goods and infringing copyright, we have to rely on more powerful law enforcement agencies that can trace counterfeit sellers outside the platform.

This Reuters report revealed that Amazon's latest anti-counterfeiting plan will be directly connected to the law enforcement system. Whenever Amazon's algorithm verifies a counterfeit infringement, it will not only directly close the store but also hand over all the store's information to law enforcement agencies for prosecution.

This means that sellers who sell counterfeit and infringing products on Amazon will not only have their stores closed, but will also face crackdowns from state forces and be subject to further fines, warnings, or even imprisonment.

Do we Chinese sellers need to worry?

For sellers who really engage in counterfeiting, they actually don’t care about such a policy at all. If they are investigated, they can just buy another store. As for the store information, it is not their own. Not to mention that the US government cannot find us, even if they really come to look for us, they cannot find the counterfeit sellers themselves.

At the moment, the most dangerous ones are definitely sellers who use their own information to register for sales but have not checked whether their products are infringing, and sellers who have been maliciously complained of infringement . Recently, many sellers have received infringement emails and had their stores frozen, and these are almost all these two situations.

If you do not win the infringement complaint at this time, it is very likely that your information will appear on the list of law enforcement agencies. Although the US government cannot control us, you don’t have to worry about jail time and fines. However, I still want to remind everyone to pay attention to another major event tomorrow - the first phase of the China-US trade settlement agreement will be officially signed tomorrow.

As we all know, the biggest disagreement between China and the United States in the trade agreement is the issue of intellectual property protection . In the agreement to be signed tomorrow, there will definitely be some clauses on intellectual property, which will have a profound impact on our cross-border sellers (especially sellers on the US site). The possibility that Chinese sellers who infringe on the rights of others in the United States will be subject to law enforcement is not an empty talk.

In the next few days, I will pay close attention to this major event and bring you corresponding reports in a timely manner. Sellers who want to know the news first, please remember to follow us.