Authentication of Luxury Products – Identifying Key Requirements from a Seller and Consumer Perspective

Luxury products are expensive goods of high quality that are produced in limited quantities. Unsurprisingly, the problem of counterfeiting is especially high for such products, causing various issues for sellers and consumers. There-fore, product authentication represents an important endeavor. While traditional approaches such as expert-based product authentication are reliable but expen-sive, consumer-based approaches are cheaper but significantly more error-prone. Hence, the development of efficient approaches that also consider the advantages of modern technologies, such as e.g., blockchains, provide a high potential for improving the status-quo. The current paper applies a mixed-method approach and reports about a quantitative survey in combination with expert interviews to identify the main requirements and preferences from consumer and seller per-spective. Results show that the knowledge of authentication methods is unevenly distributed between experts and consumers. While both consumers and experts are aware of traditional, serial number-based approaches, blockchain-enabled ways of product authentication are only known by experts. However, both groups tend to prefer digital ways of authentication and agree that sellers, followed by producers, and lastly consumers are responsible for ensuring authentic products. Consumers desire many additional features for product authentication than ex-perts. Most desired features include tracking the sales history via e.g., the block-chain or online directories, the traceability of ownership, or the possibility to con-duct home tests for consumers. The results of the paper provide researchers and practitioners with a requirement base for developing novel authentication ap-proaches.