Hijackers do not bother building their own product pages. Amazon lets any seller attach an offer to an existing product listing, so a counterfeiter finds your best-selling ASIN, lists it as available from their own storefront, and starts collecting the sales your listing earned. Your photos, your copy, your review history, their inventory. From the buyer's side, nothing looks different until the wrong product shows up.
Most Amazon purchases go through the Buy Box, the default seller a shopper buys from without ever expanding the offers list. Whoever holds the Buy Box at a given moment wins the sale, and the algorithm weighs price, shipping speed, seller metrics, and stock availability. A hijacker who undercuts you by a few dollars and claims fast fulfillment can rotate into the Buy Box and stay there, which means your ad spend and your organic ranking start feeding someone else's margins.
The hijacker prices a few percent below you. The Buy Box rotates between eligible sellers, so they do not need to hold it full time to siphon a meaningful share of orders.
Many ship through fulfilled-by-Amazon or fast merchant fulfillment, which keeps the algorithm's shipping and performance signals competitive with a legitimate seller.
When one storefront gets reported, a new one appears with a similar name and the same product photos. Professional hijackers treat storefronts as disposable.
Because the offers share one listing, complaints about the fake product dilute your star rating and review sentiment. Shoppers blame the listing, not the seller name in small print.
Check the offers list on your own ASINs and count how many sellers you did not authorize. A sudden cluster of new seller names, prices drifting below your floor, or a spike in negative reviews mentioning wrong items, poor packaging, or products that differ from the photos are all classic tells. Returns tick up with vague defect descriptions, because the buyer received a knockoff and the complaint lands on your metrics. If you see several of these at once, the listing is likely compromised, not just unlucky.
Start with a test buy from the suspect offer: purchase the product, document that it is counterfeit with photos and a comparison against your genuine item, and keep the packaging. That evidence powers every report you file next. In Brand Registry, report the ASIN for counterfeit via the report-a-violation flow, then file again if the seller re-lists, because persistence signals matter. Run your seller-name audit regularly: gate your ASINs so only authorized sellers can list against them where the platform allows it, and add product serialization or unique codes so fakes are trivially provable in a test buy.
Not entirely, because the marketplace is open by design, but it can be made unprofitable. Brands that combine gating, serialization, and continuous monitoring find that hijackers move on to easier targets after the first few removals. The expensive version of this problem is the one you discover quarterly; the cheap version is the one caught in the first week. Monitoring is the difference.
Attaching to a listing is not illegal by itself, but selling counterfeit goods under someone else's brand is. The counterfeit angle is what makes your removal requests stick, which is why test-buy evidence matters more than the complaint wording.
Anywhere from hours to weeks depending on the evidence quality and the seller's history. Clean test-buy proof with photographic comparisons moves fastest. Repeat offenders attached to the same ASIN usually get taken down faster the second time.
You can, but you are then in a margin war against a seller with no brand costs and fake product. Price cuts cost you money every order while the hijacker keeps coming back. Removing the seller fixes the cause; repricing only treats the symptom.
For a professional counterfeit seller, a takedown is a Tuesday. The listing comes down, and the same product goes back up within days: new listing...
Buyers do not blame sellers they never heard of. When a counterfeit arrives, breaks, or disappoints, the review lands on the listing the buyer...