Amazon Project Zero is your secret weapon to fight hijackers

As more people join the Amazon platform every day in a rush to build the e-commerce empire of their dreams, fighting Amazon hijackers and counterfeiters is more tricky than ever before. For every honest business person looking to build a store on Amazon and make an honest living, a counterfeiter is hanging out in the shadows looking to take advantage of their hard work.

In fact, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, 3.3% of total trade worldwide is in counterfeit products. 3.3 percent! Now that’s a staggering number. Think how much money you would lose upfront if 3.3% of your sales evaporated.

Now amplify that onto a global scale!

There’s money to be made in counterfeiting in simplest terms, and its shady economy is booming without an end, or any particular controls, insight.

Unfortunately, there’s been a cottage industry of successful Amazon hijackers for a while now. And even more unfortunate that factories, suppliers, and agents without much integrity are willing to help them get business done if it means a little more money in their pockets at the end of the day.

These relationships are one of many reasons why it’s essential to vet out your factory and supplier partners to ensure you’re working with trustworthy people who have integrity. That process is very complex and specific. A story better left for another day.

No matter your relationships with factories and suppliers – present and past – Amazon has gotten wise to the nefarious efforts of these Amazon hijackers. Regardless of their efficiency and creativity, they’ve put programs like Project Zero in place to stop them in their tracks.

Amazon’s Transparency program works hand-in-hand with Project Zero to help Amazon sellers with brand protection. It’s the tracing service that helps sellers identify potential fakes at an item level, to head off hijackers and counterfeiters before they can develop too much traction.

To get started with Project Zero you first need to take the following four steps:

1. Enroll all products in Transparency. It’s really as simple as identifying yourself as the brand owner so you’re able to get the codes you need to track what’s happening down to the item level.
2. Apply Transparency codes to all of your products. Transparency issues you unique alphanumerical and random codes which you’re able to apply to your products once received.
3. Amazon scans Transparency codes to ensure only authentic items are shipped to customers. Transparency keeps track of all codes and runs tests on all products to ensure they are authentic. If any codes fail transparency checks, they are evaluated as potential counterfeits.
4. Customers use the Transparency or Amazon Shopping apps to check on the authenticity of products regardless of how they purchase. Brands can provide granular details through Transparency at the time of scanning to aid in the purchase decision and help with authenticity verification.

Transparency is a powerful program in its own right but is fully leveraged by three impactful features of Project Zero.

Three features of Amazon’s Project Zero deliver the most significant impact to sellers on the platform:

1. Automated protections

2. Self-service counterfeit removal, and

3. Product serialization

When you provide data to Amazon, their built-in machine learning algorithms scan billions of product listings daily to identify suspected counterfeits.

And notify you of these to be flagged so you can take the necessary actions. This automated protection is massive. If you’ve been selling for Amazon for any length of time, you realize how much so. It was your responsibility as a seller to track down (and threaten) Amazon hijackers on your own for a long time. It was a very manual process. It still is for those just getting their feet wet and establishing a reputation.

Now massive web servers in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) network are your best friend and your biggest protectors, working around the clock to ensure your brand and intellectual property are safe.

As with many things that make the Amazon experience better, the addition of automation in tracking down counterfeiters is a massive relief for those dealing with an increasingly complex platform

As previously mentioned, it’s possible to remove counterfeit products once you have the data you need without having to contact Amazon at all or go through any extensive approval or review process. This self-service makes the process so much faster to get rid of fakers who shouldn’t be your competition anyhow. But they can play like they are as long as their products stay on the platform and hinder your sales.

And even better, ironically, the more counterfeiters that try to get by with fakes, the better the Amazon platform gets at identifying the characteristics that make for a counterfeit product.

So, in essence, the more counterfeiters try to take advantage of the best Amazon sellers by ripping them off, the less likely they’ll be able to in the future as Amazon’s machine learning power builds momentum and gets “smarter.”

Amazon’s default assumption within Project Zero is that all products they think could be counterfeit are counterfeit. This assumption also applies to products you notify them of manually.

Once Amazon removes products from the platform, a team of judges evaluates them to ensure assumptions are correct and go from there. There’s more peace of mind here that Amazon defaults toward action rather than taking a long time to see if the products are counterfeit.

After all, time is money. And if Amazon hijackers were still able to operate while Amazon was judging whether they should remove a product, the effect could be very damaging.

The ultimate protection comes in the ability to add unique codes to your products which Amazon scans. As they scan these codes, your product data is added to Amazon’s massive brand protection platform to make it easier for the algorithm to identify people trying to knock off your best sellers.

This serialization feature is the only one of the three core functions of Project Zero that isn’t free. You’ll pay Amazon somewhere between $.01 and $.05 per item to have an item serialized, but that minute cost is worth it for the thousands it could save you in lost sales due to counterfeiters.

Another significant part of the core features of Amazon Project Zero is that serialization stands alone.

There’s no requirement that you spend a dime if you want to take advantage of automated protections and self-service counterfeit removal. And want to wait until a later day when you have more of a runway to add product serialization protections to your product line(s).

No matter how you choose to use the features which Project Zero provides, there’s no doubt its presence alone is a massive improvement in convenience for Amazon sellers versus what they had to do previously to try to curb counterfeiting.

Like any new initiative that’s introduced, Amazon’s Project Zero isn’t perfect. It has some inherent limitations related to functionality, prioritization, and hidden costs.

There are a few fundamental limitations that are important for sellers to understand:

1. Enforcement responsibility still falls to brands

2. Other intellectual property issues aren’t a part of the process

3. Amazon doesn’t prioritize sellers by volume; for service

4. The hidden cost of trademarking as a part of the eligibility process, and

5. Manufacturing costs will be affected by serialization

Even though Project Zero helps you start the ball rolling when it comes to identifying counterfeiters, Amazon does not help brands with enforcement of these violations following identification. It’ll be your responsibility to determine when and if to enforce a breach and put the mechanisms in place to get that done.

Project Zero focuses on counterfeiters. Period. It has nothing to do with other intellectual property issues you’ll face along the way. So it’s vital that you have all of your legal “ducks in a row” to make sure you have a legal team available and ready to protect you when things get sticky.

Do you sell tens of millions of dollars worth of merchandise on Amazon every year?

That’s fantastic.

But, sorry, Amazon still won’t give you priority over other sellers when it comes to reviewing counterfeit cases under Project Zero. Therefore, the impact of lost sales can be even more damaging the bigger you are since cases could get backlogged, yours included.

Because grabbing at least one trademark for a product is part of the process, it won’t be cheap to access Project Zero. If you’ve had a product selling well that isn’t trademarked. And have essentially been rolling the dice that counterfeiters will notice – that’s no longer a luxury you can afford if you want protection.

You’ll have to go through the process of grabbing a trademark, which also may include another hidden cost: legal fees. It’s probably not something you want to do on your own without some legal advice.

And, finally, should you decide to spring for the $.01-$.05 per item to have those items serialized, then costs won’t stop there. It’s more than likely that your manufacturing partner will require you to pay for the process to be tweaked to make serialization part of the workflow. And, as you know, any changes to the manufacturing process don’t come cheap.

However, the brand protection benefits of being a part of Project Zero far outweigh the drawbacks. Especially for mature Amazon sellers who need intellectual property protections to scale and protect a growing business.

There are several things you must do first before you are eligible to enroll in Project Zero:

1. Your brand has to be enrolled in the Amazon Brand Registry with at least one government-registered trademark. If you haven’t trademarked your best-sellers yet, stop reading this article, and do that now!

Trademarking your products is the best way to protect yourself against counterfeiters. It provides you the cover you need to pursue legal action down the road if that should become necessary.

2. You have to have access to the Amazon Brand Registry via a currently active Amazon account. Simple enough.

3. You have to manually submit potential copyright infringements at an approval rate of at least 90% over the course of the last six months. If you haven’t submitted any manual violations yet, you have to crawl before you walk.

There’s something important to note here!

Be very careful about the manual submissions you send Amazon, and make sure you have a reasonable claim, so you don’t get out in front of yourself. The last thing you want to do is become trigger-happy with manual submissions if you aren’t 100% sure of their validity, as a bad record could prevent you from accessing Project Zero in the future.

Consider using DataHawk’s Amazon Products Alerts Tool as a way to set up your Amazon hijackers alerts, and stay on top of things!

Amazon Project Zero is free, but as you’ve seen above, it’s not exactly “free.”

There are plenty of other costs you’ll have to incur first along the way of building your Amazon business and getting trademarks and legal protections in place before you’ll be eligible to apply.