Amazon brings ‘Project Zero’ to India to help brands fight counterfeits

E-commerce major Amazon on Tuesday said it has rolled out 'Project Zero' in India that will provide brands with additional tools to identify and remove counterfeits from its platform. The initiative was launched earlier this year in the US, Europe (UK, France, Italy, Spain, and Germany) and Japan.

"Project Zero builds on our long-standing work and investments to ensure that customers always receive authentic goods when shopping on Amazon. We take feedback seriously and through Project Zero, we are introducing additional proactive mechanisms and powerful tools to identify, block and remove counterfeits," Amazon Customer Trust and Partner Support Vice President Dharmesh Mehta told PTI.

Globally, over 7,000 brands have already enrolled in Project Zero across US, Europe and Japan, he added.

In India, about 10-11 brands had participated in a pilot to help the company test the solutions that combine Amazon's technology with the knowledge that brands have their own intellectual property. These include brands like Hindustan Unilever, Webby, Skudgear and House of Quirk.

The three tools include 'automated protections', 'self-service counterfeit removal tool' and 'product serialisation'. Brands will have to sign up for the initiative to access the tools. Amazon's automated protections proactively and continuously scans more than 5 billion daily product listing updates globally to look for suspicious listings.

"These automated protections are powered by Amazon's machine learning and are continuously fed new information, so we continue to get better in preventing and blocking potential counterfeit listings," he said.

Product serialisation is enabled by a unique code that brands apply within their manufacturing and packaging process, and it allows Amazon to individually scan and confirm the authenticity of every single purchase of a brand's enrolled products through Amazon's marketplace.

The self-service counterfeit removal tool provides brands with the ability to directly remove listings from Amazon's marketplace. These removals also feed into automated protections, so that it can better catch potential counterfeit listings proactively in the future.