According to a recent story from Glossy, resale platforms have gotten so good at authenticating luxury goods that it’s actually impacting the global counterfeit trade.
While resale platforms were once a key revenue stream for counterfeiters, as the “market has continued to boom… stricter measures of authentication” have emerged – StockX, The RealReal, and others all have full-on “authentications teams” – and that has “dissuaded [counterfeiters] from trying to sneak fakes through.”
According to one of the prominent authentication firms, “the rate of counterfeit goods being sold at resellers has diminished from 15%… in 2017 to 10% this year,” a number that drops to 8.1% for online resellers only.
And while some counterfeiters have come to rely on consumer-to-consumer marketplaces like eBay or Grailed to avoid those authenticators, there’s been a drop-off there, too: just “14.8% of luxury accessories and fashion products sold in 2018 were fakes,” down from 20% in 2017, which is positive through any lens.
One downside to all of this is that it’s led to the rise of “superfakes” – knock-offs that are so well done, it’s almost impossible to identify them.
But, as the story noted, “while the higher quality of fakes is concerning, the decrease in overall counterfeits is good news for resellers,” and good news for the rest of the us, considering all of the horrible things the sale of counterfeit goods have funded in the past.
You can read more about it at Glossy.
