Amazon has a problem with counterfeits–and this app could be the fix | Canada Voices

When Josh Pigford’s lawn trimmer died earlier this month during a weekend bout of yard work, a sense of dread quickly crept in. It wasn’t about the weeds left unattended. It was because he had to go on Amazon to scour for replacement parts.

“I started to feel insane scrolling past all these brands with almost no selling history and names that were just gibberish,” said Mr. Pigford, a software developer in Birmingham, Ala. So he decided to build an online tool that would hide the shady brands away.

Amazon has a knockoff problem. Its marketplace is cluttered with bogus electronics, booster seats, sneakers, and oven mitts – so many kinds of dupes, in fact, that Amazon assembled a Counterfeit Crimes Unit to sniff them out.

It’s by no means the only retailer dealing with counterfeits. But it is the biggest: In February, Amazon dethroned Walmart to become the world’s largest company by sales. About 60 per cent of its merchandise sales now come from third-party sellers, rather than from Amazon itself. Many of these outside operators are perfectly upstanding vendors. A bunch of them are not.

They’re the ones keeping Amazon’s CCU busy. Last year alone, the team of ex-prosecutors, former cops, investigators and data analysts seized upwards of 15 million fake products around the globe, much of it shipped from China. That’s more than twice as many knockoffs as they nabbed in 2023.

There are some signs that a third-party seller might be peddling dupes. Its name typically consists of five to nine letters – mostly consonants, usually all-caps – bearing little relation to the products it offers or even to any language.

That’s by design. In order to enroll in Amazon’s Brand Registry, which gives third-party vendors greater prominence in search results, a seller needs to hold a trademark. Registering one with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office requires considerable time and paperwork. The process does go faster, however, if the trademark is so unique it’s unlikely to conflict with other brand names.

And that’s why a company called SUNHZMCKP is selling screwdrivers on Amazon. It’s why MLKXCVB is one of the first results for cordless weed whackers and why EHEYCIGA comes up early and often in a search for orthopedic dog beds. If a pseudo-brand gets booted off Amazon for selling counterfeits, there’s no real reputational hit, and it can just drum up another trademark.

But customers have to contend with a lot more junk when they’re browsing online. Sorting through all the dubious products takes effort, and rapturous reviews rarely help. Those reviews can be paid for by businesses or, increasingly, generated wholesale by AI bots. Recent data from U.K. research firm TruthEngine found roughly 50 per cent of online reviews are fake.

Opinion: We must do something about these fake Amazon reviews

“Peer reviews used to be such a source of trust, and that’s become so polluted,” said Vass Bednar, managing director of the Canadian Shield Institute and co-author of The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians. “Fake products and fake claims can make online shopping feel almost impossible – all the hunting and researching. You should not need investigative journalism skills to buy a pair of pants.”

Mr. Pigford’s new tool helps shoppers navigate the digital chaos. Last week, he released Knockoff, which he describes as “an app for your browser that cleans up Amazon.” Once the free extension is added to a web browser – it can be used on Chrome, Firefox and Safari, plus smaller ones – Knockoff automatically filters out listings from pseudo-brands on Amazon’s marketplace.

It works on all Amazon stores, and users choose the strictness of their filter. Questionable third-party sellers are either labelled in search results, dimmed with a grey box or concealed completely. The browser extension can also block sponsored products, hiding listings from vendors that paid Amazon for top placement on its site.

To build Knockoff, Mr. Pigford relied on those telltale signs of a pseudo-brand, assigning scores based on its ratio of consonants to vowels and how they’re grouped together – basically, whether it resembles a fairly strong password instead of a pronounceable name. Anyone who downloads Knockoff can report suspicious sellers that got through or brands that were accidentally tagged as counterfeits.

The rollout hasn’t been without hiccups: Mr. Pigford’s inbox is full of e-mails from people reporting incorrectly flagged products, each of which he manually verifies in order to fine-tune the Amazon filter. “I’ve learned a ton about the Korean beauty industry, which has a lot of interesting names and passionate users,” he said. He added a feature this week that shows a product’s country of origin.

To say there’s an audience for Knockoff’s service would be a huge understatement. Mr. Pigford’s social-media post announcing its launch immediately went viral, notching 25 million views on X in just the first 48 hours. The browser extension now has around 100,000 active daily users, a number that he calls “absolutely bonkers.”

Ms. Bednar is less surprised by the enthusiastic online response. “We’re all wading through slop. We’re trying to use our dollars effectively,” she said. “It’s a relief to fight what feels symptomatic of a broken internet with technological tools.”

It is exhausting to have to interrogate everything that pops up online. Is this image AI-generated? Is that five-star review fake? Am I about to be bamboozled by a weed whacker? Mr. Pigford hopes that Knockoff can quiet a few of those questions.

“It helps people discern what’s real,” he said. “In a small way, it lets them take back some control of an internet experience that’s been so hijacked.”