Amazon is fighting against laws that could force it to verify third-party sellers' identities and give out their contact information

Authored by businessinsider.in and submitted by Sumit316

Amazon has been lobbying against a new form of legislation called INFORM acts, Axios reports.

has been against a new form of legislation called INFORM acts, Axios reports. These acts would force e-commerce sites to verify third-party sellers ' identities and provide contact information to customers.

' identities and provide contact information to customers. Amazon and others argue the legislation would jeopardize third-party sellers' privacy.

Amazon has lobbied against new laws that would force it to investigate third-party sellers' identities more thoroughly, and share contact details for them with customers, Axios reports.

Amazon is fighting against a specific type of new legislation called INFORM acts, which have been proposed both at state and Congressional levels, per Axios.These acts have been supported by retailers including Home Depot and Walgreens, and if passed they would require online retailers to verify the identity of third-party sellers and provide customers with contact details for the sellers.Amazon, along with fellow e-retailersand, argues that the legislation endangers the privacy of third-party sellers.

"The INFORM Act favors large brick-and-mortar retailers, at the expense of small businesses that sell online, while doing nothing to prevent fraud and abuse or hold bad actors accountable," an Amazon spokesperson told Axios.

This week Amazon achieved a partial victory - the legislation was not attached to a sweeping tech and science funding bill that passed the Senate . The new US Innovation and Competition Act is aimed at keeping the US tech sector competitive with China. It still has to pass the House, and Axios notes that amendments that include INFORM legislation are still possible.

Amazon's spokesperson addressed this possibility in a statement to Axios. "Like many other companies, including online retailers and small businesses that sell online, we had concerns with attaching controversial legislation pushed by big-box retailers to the broader China bill," the spokesperson said.

Amazon confirmed in July last year that it would start publicly listing the names and addresses of US-based third-party sellers to help tackle counterfeiting on its platform, following a report by Insider . The company announced in May that it seized and destroyed over 2 million counterfeit goods over the course of 2020. Amazon was not immediately available for comment when contacted by Insider.

Adroite on June 11st, 2021 at 16:01 UTC »

There is also the Shop Safe Act that some retailers are pushing for.

https://judiciary.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=2838

The company I work for sells about 2,000 unique skus on Amazon. More than half of those have a knock off equivalent of some type. Some products have as many as 5 or more companies selling a knock off. We have even found instances of them using our instructions in their packaging. They don't even bother to take our name or logo off.

We report them over and over and over, but they just pop up again under a new name. While they lose their reviews and trend velocity, it doesn't take them long to get a new page setup. It's bad for us because their parts are poorly made and customers think they are ours. We have had a number of law suits because of part failures that we had to prove were not ours.

Amazon is making a killing off these sellers. They have massive margin and they don't even need to advertise. Then, we go on to spend more than a 1/2 million in advertising each year on Amazon and the knock off products don't spend a dime, yet get on our page as 'recommended' or 'customers also viewed.'

The Shop Safe Act would actually put some of the responsibility on Amazon to police stuff being sold. I recall reading a couple years ago that more than half of what is sold on Amazon is coming directly from China. As in, directly from Chinese sellers. It's bad news.

Sumit316 on June 11st, 2021 at 14:52 UTC »

A quick summary or Tl;dr

Amazon has been lobbying against a new form of legislation called INFORM acts, Axios reports.

These acts would force e-commerce sites to verify third-party sellers' identities and provide contact information to customers.

Amazon and others argue the legislation would jeopardize third-party sellers' privacy.

Foxhound199 on June 11st, 2021 at 14:46 UTC »

I used to think fake junk on Amazon was a huge problem for the company that they needed to address. As time went on, it became clear that fake junk was the core of their business model.