NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — Last year, almost $300 billion of products were sold on Amazon through third parties, but the demand is driving a huge chunk of counterfeit good sales in the U.S.
When you buy something on a large E-commerce site like Amazon, around half the time it’s not coming from the tech giant itself, but from a third-party seller.
Experts say this system combined with increased consumer demand around E-commerce is leading to people taking advantage of the system.
When you buy something on Amazon, it falls into one of three purchase buckets:
- Goods that are sold and shipped by Amazon.
- Items that are sold by third-party businesses to Amazon, who then ships the goods out.
- Items that are both sold and shipped by third-party sellers but are listed on Amazon's marketplace.
In 2020, third-party businesses accounted for nearly 60% of all sales on Amazon’s Marketplace.
Counterfeit goods experts say the barriers to entry for third-party sellers selling counterfeits is so low that there is no real way to stay away from these platforms.
According to Amazon's website, it does ban the sale of counterfeit products on their platform.
Last year, Amazon proactively removed 10 billion counterfeit listings and destroyed 2 million items in its warehouses that were identified as counterfeits.
Congress is looking to push these E-commerce companies to better track potential counterfeit sellers.
A bipartisan group of Senators wants to pass the Inform Consumers Act, which would require online marketplaces to provide more transparent data on the identity of third-party sellers.
