Monica Ravi leads Amazon’s Transparency program, driving global product authenticity and trust across millions of items sold on Amazon. In her role, she oversees strategy, innovation, and collaborations that protect brands and customers from counterfeit goods. With over a decade at Amazon, Monica has held leadership roles spanning operations, fulfillment, and retail innovation — including launching new retail formats and managing end-to-end business P&Ls. She is passionate about building scalable systems that create safer, more transparent supply chains for consumers and brand owners alike.
A landmark shift in retail product authentication
The retail industry is approaching an important evolution in how products are identified and authenticated. By the end of 2027, retail point-of-sale (POS) systems globally will support 2D barcodes as part of GS1 Sunrise 2027. This industry-wide transition will affect millions of products sold in stores and online.
I’ve worked across retail operations, fulfillment, and brand protection at Amazon for over a decade and I’ve seen countless technological shifts. But Sunrise stands apart—not just because of its technical scope, but because of the transformative opportunity it creates for the industry. At Amazon, we’re deeply focused on solving the persistent challenges of counterfeiting, returns fraud, and stolen goods and we believe GS1 Sunrise 2027 could be a powerful solution to these industry-wide problems. That’s exactly why we’re excited to join GS1 as a Premier Solution Partner. This collaboration creates a clear path forward for brands facing strategic decisions. This is the kind of moment that energizes me: a chance to help brands rethink their approach to product authentication and build lasting customer trust.
The shift presents brands with a strategic choice: simply comply with these new industry requirements or build on them to address the systemic retail challenges of counterfeiting, returns fraud, and stolen goods. With a unified solution, brands no longer need to manage multiple codes on packaging—one for compliance, another for authentication, and additional codes for consumer engagement. They can also avoid investing millions in building their own serialization infrastructure with upfront costs and months of implementation time.
Amazon Transparency, our product serialization and authentication service, has joined GS1 as a Premier Solution Partner to help address this challenge. By integrating unit-level serialization, which is the ability to assign a unique identifier to each individual product unit, with GS1’s globally recognized 2D barcode format, the same barcode that authenticates a product in Amazon stores can be scanned at any retailer’s POS register. This interoperability is what makes the opportunity so significant.
Over years of working with more than 88,000 brands on unit-level serialization, we’ve seen firsthand how impactful this technology can be. While not required for Sunrise compliance, adding unit-level serialization to 2D barcodes fundamentally changes what’s possible in brand protection and supply chain visibility, helping build a foundation of trust that modern retail requires.
Transforming product authentication for a trustworthy shopping experience
Customers should be able to shop with confidence knowing they have access to safe and authentic products. This expectation has driven significant innovation in brand protection. Through collaboration with printing and packaging leaders over the past decade, the cost and complexity of serialization have been substantially reduced. Sunrise creates a unique opportunity to potentially extend these benefits across the industry through open, standardized barcodes that work across all retailers that lay the foundation to create an interoperable product verification network.
The key advancement here is industry-wide standardization. Current UPC, Global Trade Item Number (GTIN), and Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) tracking systems can only identify product types, not individual units. Sunrise codes integrated with unit-level serialization could enable any retailer to scan and capture both the product identifier like a GTIN and a unique serial number for that specific unit. When widely adopted, this capability could help address critical challenges facing the retail industry in several ways:
- Preventing stolen goods from being resold. Retailers could identify and block specific serial numbers across retail channels, making it significantly harder for stolen merchandise to re-enter the legitimate supply chain.
- Reducing organized returns fraud. Retailers could verify whether a returned item was legitimately purchased, helping prevent fraudulent returns of stolen or counterfeit goods.
- Combating counterfeiting at scale. Unit-level serialization could enable retailers to authenticate products at multiple points in the supply chain, from manufacturing through final sale, making it exponentially more difficult for counterfeit products to reach customers.
Building a unified defense through industry collaboration
This is a massive industry shift, and having spent years building scalable authentication systems, I know how complex these implementations can be. That’s why I’m passionate about what Transparency can do for brands during this transition. Amazon’s commitment to protecting customers, brands, and selling partners continues to drive innovation. The integration of GS1 standards into Transparency represents a significant step forward for product authentication and serialization. We designed our Sunrise support to be accessible and straightforward: no upfront implementation fees and self-service enrollment in days rather than months. By incorporating these foundational supply chain standards, brands will have a much simpler path to adopting serialization, reducing operational friction and strengthening product protection and customer trust.
The benefits of integration extend beyond today’s requirements to tomorrow’s challenges, supporting emerging regulations, like the European Union’s Digital Product Passport requirements that will require detailed product information and sustainability data to be accessible throughout a product’s lifecycle. This integration helps ensure interoperability across retail systems globally, making it easier for brands to meet evolving requirements across different markets.
Sunrise represents more than a technical upgrade—it’s a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rethink how the retail industry protects products and builds customer trust. The transition is coming whether brands are ready or not, and the decisions brands made now will shape supply chain security for decades to come.
The path forward
Moving to Sunrise requires careful planning, particularly for brands considering serialization. Key considerations include evaluating current packaging and printing capabilities, understanding how serialization integrates with existing supply chain operations, and determining which retail channels will benefit most from enhanced authentication.
Solutions like Transparency demonstrate how GS1 standards can be integrated with unit-level tracking—showing that compliance and enhanced protection can work together through a single code. As brands navigate this transition, the decisions made now will determine not just regulatory compliance, but the foundation for supply chain security and customer trust for years to come.
More information about Transparency can be found here.