The millions of small and medium-sized businesses around the world selling in our store help provide the vast selection and great prices customers love about Amazon. In our U.S. store, the majority of these independent businesses are American companies and each has its own story: from mom and pop shops going online, veterans-turned-business owners, to young entrepreneurs taking a chance. Last year, we created Amazon Storefronts, a curated destination where customers can shop exclusively from U.S. businesses. Almost 30,000 small and medium-sized brands are in Amazon Storefronts, and they’ve sold more than 250 million items to more than 70 million customers. U.S. small and medium-sized companies sell on average more than 4,000 items per minute in our store and these businesses employ over 800,000 people. These successes aren’t just here in the U.S.–our selling partners from around the world are just as vibrant.
Working with millions of small businesses from around the world, we also have the responsibility to protect them, and our customers, from bad actors that attempt to take advantage of our store. We know that customer trust is hard to earn, which is why we work hard every day to help ensure all products offered in our store are safe and authentic, and customers see accurate product information and genuine reviews.
We require all products in our store to comply with applicable laws, regulations and Amazon policies. We vet selling partners when they open an account and continuously scan product listings and updates to detect fraud or abuse. In fact, every few minutes, our tools review hundreds of millions of products, scan more than five billion daily attempted product listing updates, and analyze tens of millions of customer reviews submitted weekly.
We know there’s a lot to learn when you start your own business, so we developed educational videos and hold online webinars to help selling partners with everything from expanding their business into a new country to learning about regulatory and product safety compliance. We also continue to invent and launch initiatives such as IP Accelerator, which helps brands obtain intellectual property rights faster and in a more cost effective manner, and Project Zero, which has three powerful tools: automated protections that continuously scan our stores and proactively remove suspect listings, a self-service counterfeit removal tool so brands can instantly stop the sale of an inauthentic product listing if they see one, and a serialization service that provides a unique code placed on every unit that is manufactured by the brand and enrolled in the program so we can scan and verify the authenticity of the product before we ship it to a customer.
In 2018 alone, we invested more than $400 million to ensure customers have a great shopping experience and selling partners have a great selling experience in our store. Last year, we:
  • Blocked more than a million bad actor accounts before they published a single listing
  • Blocked more than three billion suspected bad listings before they were published to our stores
  • Prevented more than 13 million attempts to leave an inauthentic review
We use sophisticated tools to combat bad actors and make it increasingly difficult for them to hide. Our efforts have ensured more than 99.9% of all Amazon page views by our customers landed on pages that did not receive a notice of potential counterfeit infringement and more than 99% of the reviews read by customers are authentic. Beyond blocking bad actors from our store, we also dedicate significant time and investment to holding them accountable offline—we withhold funds, conduct investigations, pursue civil and criminal litigation and work with law enforcement.
We take our responsibility seriously and have more than 5,000 employees worldwide that protect our store, customers, and selling partners from fraud and abuse. Sellers can contact us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week should they have a concern and customers are always protected with our A-to-z Guarantee. The Amazon A-to-z Guarantee protects customers when they purchase items sold by a third-party seller. Our guarantee covers both the timely delivery and the condition of the items. If either are unsatisfactory, customers can contact us for a full refund.