How is it different from a centralized database that also stores and tracks ids of their products? A lot of companies that have to deal with scammers counterfeiting their product were using these methods even before blockchain was invented. And what would stop scammers from doing the oldest trick in the book - copying the identifier of a genuine item and slapping it on their fakes?
Exactly what I was just thinking.
Perhaps make the verification/secret keys (which should be worth the price of each product) their products tokens so that customers can buy them first before they can verify the products with the keys, maybe combined with codes on the products.
The companies could even hide certain features on their products and put them in better smart-contracts for users to find and verify their products more properly.
Here you can check how Nike plans to do it
https://cointelegraph.com/news/nike-patents-a-system-for-tokenizing-shoes-on-ethereums-blockchain!
Nothing is impossible, but it will be very hard for counterfeiters to do something here. Many companies used different methods, but now with blockchain companies have a better tool. I think this will work, but probably we will need to wait and see how good it will work, and what counterfeiters can do here. In theory this can be very good thing, but reality is something else, scammers are smarter too, this races last for years, and maybe blockchain technology can make some difference in favor of companies.
As long as people are aware of method for detecting and countering the counterfeits, it will succeed with a good system.
Well decentralized system would be an awesome way to make this hard to counterfeit as far as I can tell. A centralized system will have to worry about insiders, hackers or even owners defeating the anti-counterfeit system.