Amazon’s Anti-Counterfeit Measure, ‘Transparency,’ Launches in Canada

Amazon today announced the expansion of Amazon Transparency, a product serialization service that prevents counterfeit goods from being shipped to France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, India, and Canada.

The e-commerce giant is rolling out Transparency — its product serialization service used by more than 4,000 brands in the United States — to brands selling on its platform in those seven countries, reads a new press release sent to IIC.

Transparency provides a unique, alphanumeric non-sequential code for every product unit that is manufactured. It keeps a record of every code along with the product for which it was generated and uses the information to authenticate products. When brands enroll in Transparency, they are issued with a series of codes.

The codes are then attached by brands to their products. Each time one of these products is ordered in Amazon’s stores, Amazon scans and verifies the code to ensure only authentic products reach customers and not fakes.



“Counterfeiting is an industry-wide concern – both online and offline,” says Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of Customer Trust and Partner Support. “We find the most effective solutions to prevent counterfeit are based on partnerships that combine Amazon’s technology innovation with the sophisticated knowledge and capabilities of brands. We created Transparency to provide brands with a simple, scalable solution that empowers brands and Amazon to authenticate products within the supply chain, stopping counterfeit before it reaches a customer.”

Hundreds of U.S. brands continue to enroll in the service every month. Amazon first announced product serialization in February 2019 as part of a broader U.S. anti-counterfeiting program known as Project Zero. In addition to serialization, Project Zero also enables brands to provide Amazon with their logos, trademarks, and other key data, and Amazon scans over 5 billion product listing updates every day, looking for suspected counterfeits.

Amazon is set to launch its Prime Day shopping event on July 15-16.