Nike to stop selling shoes and clothing on Amazon

Sportswear brand puts an end to two-year partnership with the e-commerce site

Nike has announced it will no longer sell its products on Amazon, ending a pilot scheme that began in 2017.

For many years, Nike products sold on Amazon were mostly unofficial and counterfeits sold by third party vendors, meaning the brand had little control over how the items were listed, what information was available and whether they were real.

To tackle the issue, Nike joined Amazon’s brand registry program in 2017, with the hope it could regain control over third-party sellers and potential counterfeit goods on the e-commerce site.

However, Nike discovered that eradicating third-party sellers was more difficult than first anticipated with new vendors often popping up under different names when they were removed.

The official Nike products also had fewer reviews and therefore received worse positioning on the site.

As a result, the apparel company has revealed it will be bringing the scheme to a close.

“As part of Nike’s focus on elevating consumer experiences through more direct, personal relationships we have made the decision to complete our current pilot with Amazon,” Nike said in a statement to Bloomberg.

“We will continue to invest in strong, distinctive partnerships for Nike with other retailers and platforms to seamlessly serve our consumers globally.”

Nike added that it will continue to use Amazon’s cloud-computing unit, Amazon Web Services, to power its apps and Nike.com services.

The shift comes amid a massive overhaul of Nike’s retail strategy and also follows the hiring of former-Ebay chief executive John Donahoe as its next CEO.

Earlier this year, consumer watchdog Which? revealed that third-party sellers were using a range of tactics to beat Amazon’s security systems, including bribery and hacking, to post fake product reviews

Which? said features designed to make the online retailer’s website more user-friendly were being “abused on a grand scale” to fool customers.

“Our investigation shows the lengths that unscrupulous sellers will go to to constantly pull the wool over the eyes of shoppers,” Natalie Hitchins, Which?’s head of home products and services, said at the time.

“Writing or commissioning fake or incentivised reviews is in breach of consumer law and can lead to criminal action against the individuals responsible. It is unacceptable that consumers continue to be misled into buying poor quality or even unsafe products by the current system of reviews and rankings."