Amazon removing millions of products for very concerning reason

The online retail giant has been working to remove a particularly insidious type of product.

Mar 30, 2024 - 22:30

0 23

Amazon removing millions of products for very concerning reason

One of the best parts of shopping in the 21st century is that consumers have access to millions, if not billions, of items without even needing to leave their house.

It's estimated that Amazon (AMZN) itself sells between 300 million and 600 million SKUs (or stock keeping units, the industry term for individual items) at any given time, and the retail giant is constantly updating its inventory.

But it's not just variety that shoppers are looking for every time they log onto their favorite online shopping platform.

Whether it's Walmart+, Target's new membership program Circle Rewards, Amazon Prime, or a laundry list of other online retailers, companies are certainly expected to keep a large inventory of goods. But in order to keep your customers, companies are also expected to offer lightning-fast delivery options (Amazon's two-or-less day delivery remains the gold standard.)

Some may tempt customers by offering other savings on goods like fuel, cash back on purchases, or access to other highly coveted services like streaming platforms.

Amazon cracking down on millions of items

But one of the most highly prized — and hardest to attain — aspects of the online shopping experience is consumer trust. It can be difficult to earn for nearly any company, but large ones struggle especially so, since they source so many different items from thousands of different merchants and verifying authenticity and quality can be something like playing a game of whack-a-mole.

A computer screen showing the Amazon Prime event storefront.
NurPhoto/Getty Images

And if retailers do end up selling a counterfeit or faulty item, be it known or unknown, consumer trust can erode quickly and can be difficult to get back.

This has been especially the case for Amazon, which works with merchants from around the globe and has little recourse for identifying fake or counterfeit items. It tries its best to cut down on fakes, but consumers are largely forced to read others' reviews of items to determine if a product really is what it says it is.

In 2020, Amazon rolled out its Counterfeit Crimes Unit, which utilizes professional analysts and investigators to identify potential fake items and remove them from the site. In 2023, it rolled out the Anti-Counterfeit Exchange, which is an online platform that tracks and posts fake products to help online merchants.

And in March, Amazon said it had found and removed over seven million fake or counterfeit items on its website using the various investments and teams it stood up to combat the issue.

Amazon said that, in 2023, it had invested $1.2 billion and hired 15,000 employees to help solve the issue, and it's working toward zero counterfeits as a part of its mission to be "Earth’s most customer-centric company."

The company also said it stopped 700,000 bad actor attempts to stand up new fake businesses or accounts purporting to be selling something authentic. It mentioned it was working directly with Chinese law enforcement in particular to stop such attempts from becoming pervasive on the site.

Those efforts in 2023 "led to more than 50 successful raid actions with more than 100 bad actors identified and detained for questioning, many of whom are manufacturers, suppliers, or upstream distributors of counterfeit products. This collaboration resulted in numerous criminal convictions, including fines and prison sentences," the company said in a press release.