Amazon's new team is established! Another driving force for customs inspection

Since the last time ACCU seized the service providers selling account numbers, Amazon has made another big move. Last week, it announced the establishment of a new team called Anti-Counterfeiting Exchange (ACX), which is mainly aimed at combating counterfeit and copycat products on the platform.

ACCU already has the work of cracking down on counterfeit sellers, so why did they set up the ACX team? After some research, I found that ACX is not a simple anti-counterfeiting team, but more like a "fake marking platform", which is even one of the culprits of the recent frequent customs inspections.

In our general understanding, the anti-counterfeiting team usually takes the potential risk list provided by the platform to investigate the sellers, determine the actual beneficiaries of the counterfeit stores, and then work with local agencies to arrest people. This is what ACCU is doing. What ACX needs to do is to make a platform-based blacklist of information on counterfeit products, sellers and companies. Not only Amazon will update this list, but other platforms are also being lured in to use it.

Therefore, the ACX team did not do the work I mentioned at the beginning of catching counterfeit sellers, but instead communicated with more e-commerce platforms and joined the ranks of maintaining the ACX blacklist.

According to current information, ACX will use a credit card settlement system to exchange data with e-commerce platforms such as Walmart, Wayfair, and eBay to share information about counterfeit products and stores. This is a fatal blow to counterfeit sellers roaming around on various platforms. Once caught by the ACX list, mainstream platforms will be unable to operate directly. If multiple platforms are selling at the same time, it is also possible that if one of them is judged as a counterfeit, the other platforms will also die.

If that were the case, the only ones affected would be the sellers of counterfeit and imitation products, and there would be no problem if we were to make normal products. However, here comes the but, this ACX platform is not just about connecting information with e-commerce platforms.

That’s right. From what Amazon has announced, ACX’s docking department also includes the Customs and Border Protection Bureau, including pilot data sharing and inspection assistance. On the one hand, the customs can share the customs clearance information of the counterfeit products that have been found with Amazon, and on the other hand, Amazon can also share the information of sellers suspected of selling counterfeit goods on the platform, so that the customs can strengthen the inspection during the inspection.

In addition to increasing the probability and time required for customs clearance inspections, the most critical thing about this linkage is that many sellers, for cost considerations, will use low declarations when clearing customs. If Amazon shares data with customs, sellers’ low declarations are likely to be flagged. This linkage is a bit damaging. Even if there is no risk of selling counterfeit goods, the loss caused by not being able to low declare is very heavy.