Mostly, yes, for the listings they cover. Amazon Transparency puts a unique code on every unit you enroll, and Amazon checks that code before the item ships to a customer. A counterfeiter cannot reuse a valid code at scale without getting caught, which pushes fakes toward easier targets: marketplaces without the check, or your own listings for units you never enrolled. The program works best as a wall around your highest-risk ASINs, not as a blanket you throw over everything.
Each enrolled unit carries a unique alphanumeric Transparency code, printed on the packaging or applied as a label. When a customer orders, Amazon scans the code at the fulfillment center and verifies it against your code registry before shipping. No valid code, no shipment. The check happens on every order, including FBA units, which closes the commingling loophole that used to let fakes ride on your listing through shared inventory pools.
This changes the counterfeiter's economics. Copying your product is still possible. Copying your product with a valid, unique, verifiable code for every unit is much harder, because valid codes cannot be guessed or mass-produced. The fakes that do appear tend to cluster in two places: listings for units you sell FBM where no scan happens, and marketplaces that have no equivalent program at all.
Transparency is an Amazon program, and counterfeiters are platform-agnostic. A brand fully enrolled on Amazon can still get hammered on Walmart, eBay, TikTok Shop, and independent sites, where no code is ever scanned. Inside Amazon, the gaps are narrower but real: FBM sellers who never enrolled, international marketplaces where you have not enabled the program, and the oldest trick in the book, a counterfeit box with a photocopied genuine code. A copied code works exactly once before the duplicate scan flags it, but once can be enough for one sale.
Enrollment coverage is the other gap. Brands enroll their hero ASINs and skip the long tail, which is rational until a counterfeiter notices the unenrolled variants and concentrates there. Audit your catalog quarterly: if a SKU sells meaningful volume and is not enrolled, it is the softest target you own.
Transparency costs money: per-unit codes, labeling changes, operational overhead at the pack line. The math works when counterfeits are measurably costing you sales or reviews on Amazon. If test buys keep turning up fakes on your top ten ASINs, or your listings collect one-star reviews complaining about quality on products you know are good, enrollment usually pays back within a quarter through recovered buy-box share and fewer review fires.
It pays less when your counterfeit problem lives mostly off Amazon. Codes do nothing for a TikTok livestream seller moving knockoffs by the thousand. Match the tool to the battlefield: Transparency for Amazon, takedown programs and monitoring for everywhere else. The brands that win treat it as one layer in a stack, not as the whole strategy.
The operational pitfalls are avoidable. Print or apply codes during manufacturing, not as a relabeling step in your warehouse, because post-hoc labeling is where errors and costs balloon. Keep your code ranges reconciled with production runs so a legitimate unit never fails a scan. And brief customer service: when a customer reports a code that does not verify in the Transparency app, treat it as a potential counterfeit report, not a glitch, and route it to your enforcement process.
Used well, Transparency turns Amazon from your leakiest channel into your best-defended one. The counterfeiters do not disappear. They move somewhere cheaper to operate, which is exactly the point.