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Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

Kind of surprised the article (or the Amazon spokesperson) didn't mention Transparency, which has been in development for some time: https://brandservices.amazon.com/transparency

The basic idea: Vendor places unique 2D barcode on each unit of a branded product, only products with those barcodes get placed into Amazon warehouse inventory, consumers can scan the barcode themselves to verify it's legit.

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Yes, and amazon gets to put a sticker on every item you sell (or at least the SKUs you enroll in transparency) no matter what channel you sell it in. I can’t imagine why vendors might not want to do that if they want to sell anyplace other than Amazon.

Seems like you're being sarcastic? But I don't see why. It means all your customers would get the anti-counterfeiting benefit, not only the ones who purchase from Amazon, since non-Amazon customers can verify the code too.

Seems like a win for everybody. (Also, you're putting the codes on your items yourself, Amazon's not doing it.)

Yes, I am being sarcastic. There may be a benefit to customers but your products will have calls to action on them to download and install an Amazon app on your phone when you’re in a retailer like Target or Best Buy. I think that’s the real reason for the transparency program.

It's not at all clear to me that people will be able to tell what that T+code sticker is on their product they purchased at e.g. Best Buy. I think the purpose of the program is to fight counterfeits.

It doesn't seem like a very good system. Counterfeiters will simply buy a real batch of products, and then copy each T-code onto their counterfeits 1000 times, then resell both the real and the counterfeit.

It says Amazon scans the code before shipping - presumably it would be a red flag if the scan says the product was already sold.

I assume that the barcode is encrypted using a private key, and decrypted by Amazon or the app using a public key.

That seems like a really clever solution actually. Big brands can print unique barcodes on each unit, small brands can manually slap on stickers. And it looks like it can be used for all sales channels, not just Amazon. It will instantly stop counterfeiting in its tracks.

It seems like companies would be all over this, but this is the first I've heard of it. What are the obstacles? Is Amazon charging too much for it? (Honestly it seems like it's better for them to subsidize it, if anything.) Is it not fully rolled out yet?

There are probably some challenges with upgrading their manufacturing systems to generate and print the codes out. Currently standard UPCs for a lot of products are pre-printed at a vendor with all the rest of the packaging (like for bags of chips, all the UPCs are already printed on rolls of film that are stored at a factory before they're filled). They'd have to change it so that this newer 'UPC' would be printed during manufacturing like a code date would be.

They'll probably start moving towards it; especially since it'll also give better control over getting feedback on product quality from consumers or communicating recalls. Right now, it's kind of cumbersome, because things that are coded with lots or manufacturing code dates aren't really that easy for consumers or retailers to use.

Putting individual stickers on items is more expensive than you’d think. And most box manufacturers are set up for printing lots of the identical box - changing those lines would be hard.

What prevents a counterfeiter from copying the barcode?

These are GUIDs, not SKUs. If two customers get the same ID, one is counterfeit.

That does nothing to prevent the first one from being counterfeit, allowing many counterfeits with 'valid' guids to be accepted if they arrive sooner.

"nothing" Is overstating it. While this doesn't guarantee that the legit item gets to the customer, I feel confident that the real seller will usually win that race.

In order for the counterfeiter to win, the counterfeiter would have to get the fake item with the real number into an Amazon warehouse before the real item arrived. Add to this the fact that the vendor of the real item will be told their item was rejected as dupe, and there's nothing I can see in the program documentation requiring the tags to be sequential, and this raises the bar quite a bit.

Counter for how many times the barcode had been checked.

Yes, but make 5 fakes with each real product barcode, then intermingle them, and there will still be no way to seperate the real ones from the fakes.

To do that, for every 5 fakes you make you need to buy 1 genuine product - to copy the code from it. That's not profitable this way.

Why would Amazon even receive them into inventory if the initial scan says the product was already sold (assuming that a product must be purchased to get a valid code to copy)?

And what happens when the FC does notice a fake? Do they actually promise to not ship it?

Once an asin is marked as being part of transparency they will reject it after a sell through period for any existing inventory.

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