In response to a Wall Street Journal story about the safety of products offered in our store, we're sharing information about our industry-leading safety and compliance program.

Amazon strives to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where people can find and discover the widest possible selection of safe and authentic goods, and we work hard to earn and maintain your trust. In 2018 alone, we invested over $400 million to protect our store and our customers and built robust programs to ensure products offered are safe, compliant, and authentic.

Amazon offers customers hundreds of millions of items, and we have developed, and continuously refine and improve, our tools that prevent suspicious, unsafe, or non-compliant products from being listed in our store.

Our proactive measures begin when a seller attempts to open an account. Our new seller account vetting includes a number of verifications and uses proprietary machine learning technology that stops bad actors before they can register or list a single product in our store. All products offered in our stores must comply with applicable laws and regulations, and our own policies. For example, we require toys to be tested to relevant safety standards set by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. We have a dedicated global team of compliance specialists that review submitted safety documentation, and we have additional qualification requirements that sellers must meet to offer products. In 2018, our teams and technologies proactively blocked more than three billion suspect listings for various forms of abuse, including non-compliance, before they were published to our store.

Once a product is available in our store, we continuously scan our product listings and updates to find products that might present a concern. Every few minutes, our tools review the hundreds of millions of products, scan the more than five billion attempted daily changes to product detail pages, and analyze the tens of millions of customer reviews that are submitted weekly for signs of a concern and investigate accordingly. Our tools use natural language processing and machine learning, which means new information is fed into our tools daily so they can learn and constantly get better at proactively blocking suspicious products.

In addition, we provide a number of ways for regulatory agencies, industry organizations, brands, customers, and our customer service teams to report safety issues. When we receive these reports, we move quickly to protect customers, remove unsafe products from our store, and investigate. For example, if a customer reports a concern with a product, a customer service associate can instantly trigger an investigation. Additionally, because of our direct relationships with customers, we are able to trace and directly notify customers who purchased a particular product online and alert them to a potential safety issue—our systems are far more effective than other online and offline retailers and customers can feel confident they’ll have the information they need.

We also regularly work with agencies including the Food and Drug Administration and Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the information we share helps them identify trends and develop regulations. We are active in industry working groups and committees that are dedicated to developing new solutions and guidelines that will benefit all retailers and consumers.

We invest significant resources to protect our customers and have built robust programs designed to ensure products offered for sale in our store are safe and compliant. We want customers to shop with confidence and if ever a customer has a concern, they can contact our customer service team, and we will investigate.