Alibaba Takes A Bold Step To Combat Fakery

Alibaba announced its official membership in the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition (IACC) to combat counterfeit goods.

Alibaba Group Holding has been facing the counterfeit goods issue on its online marketplaces for a very long time now. The first official complain it received was two years ago where the luxurious brand owners were concerned about losing a major chunk of market share to the Chinese e-commerce platform as it provides the same product (more or less in quality) at lower prices. Alibaba.com and Taobao Marketplace were previously listed in the US notorious market for fake goods as well but that all changed a bit from 2011.

The founder and chairman of Alibaba Group, Jack Ma, said two years back that counterfeit goods on any e-commerce platform is a cancer and announced to heavily invest in order to combat fakery. Jack Ma wanted to clean up the image of Alibaba in Chinese and international market as a platform of counterfeit goods. The recent efforts of the Chinese tech giant to crack down on fakery shows that the company and Jack Ma are trying very hard to not break the promise of coming clean again.

In order to further fuel its combat against counterfeiting, Alibaba has announced its official membership in the IACC also known as International Anti Counterfeiting Coalition. The IACC is the largest non profit organization of the world that deals in fighting against product counterfeiting as well as piracy. After officially announcing its membership in the IACC, Alibaba becomes the first ever e-commerce company to be a member of the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition which already has 250 companies on board. Other names include Apple Inc., Burberry Group, Nike Inc., and Rolex etc.

The Vice President and Head of Global IP Enforcement at Alibaba Group, Matthew Bassiur, said in a statement “Preserving the integrity of Alibaba’s marketplaces is a top priority. Counterfeiting is a global, industry-wide issue, and effective collaboration with brands, retailers, trade associations, governments and other industry partners is a key component to our overall success.”

The president of IACC Bob Barchiesi is also thrilled to welcome Alibaba on board to become the first e-commerce platform to join the IACC. He added that “With the pace at which the market is moving, the successful e-commerce platforms will be those who build the right strategic partnerships to ensure safe and trusted marketplaces. We encourage more industry players to join in our efforts.”

The partnership between Alibaba and IACC tracks back three years ago where it used a market safe program to clean counterfeit fake goods and listings from its Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com platforms. Therefore since 2013 it has managed to ban almost 5,000 sellers on its marketplaces along with deleting more than 160,000 fake products.