Brand Registry & Hijacking: How to Protect Your Amazon Business

Brand Registry & Hijacking: How to Protect Your Amazon Business

Posted from iLoveToReview, December 1, 2015 By: Tina Marie Bueno

You take your first few sips of freshly brewed coffee as you sit in front of the computer to review your Amazon performance from the day before. You look at your daily sales on one product…up 15%

Imagine this…

Brand Registry ~ Protecting Your Amazon Business

You look at the next product and instead of your smile getting bigger…your mouth drops open and a sinking feeling prevails as you notice that you’ve lost the Buy Box and your sales have bottomed out. You immediately realize your listing has been hijacked!


What’s happening?

★ Hi-jacked product listings with title & description changes

★ Knocked off products

★ Price cutting = drop in your sales

★ Lost Buy Box status

This is becoming a familiar scene in Amazon’s growing Private Label market…


So Amazon created the Brand Registry program intended to:

★ Give registered Sellers expert status for more authority over listing content such as titles, details, images, & other attributes.

★ Preclude anyone else from being able to use your registered brand name.

★ Generate a unique Global Catalog Identifier (GCID) for your products, which reduces matching errors to similar products.

★ Help Amazon shut down counterfeits of your product.

It almost appears that no one’s Amazon business is completely safe


Why? Because the Brand Registry program does NOT:

★ Prevent other Sellers from selling your product even if you are the Brand owner & have not authorized them as distributors. (For example, if a buyer purchases from a brand owner, then turns around to resell the item, it is considered as selling an authentic item.)

★ Block Sellers from buying the same product from a manufacturer (maybe even from yours) with a slight variation, branding it themselves, & directly competing against you.

★ Make Amazon responsible for any trademark infringements nor enforce U.S. trademark laws.

★ Guarantee automatic Buy Box status.

Brand Registry is not impermeable


1. Manufacturers or brand owners; and,

2. Distributors, resellers & other individuals or companies who have submit this written authorization from the manufacturer or brand owner to manage a brand's content on Amazon.

Heads up, only these Sellers can enroll:


★ An active website that displays:

✤ your company & brand name

✤ products product details

✤ address, phone number, & a company domain email address. (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail addresses are unacceptable to Amazon)

★ An image of your product packaging with branding visible on the packaging

★ An image of a product with your branding visible on the product itself

★ A unique key attribute for each product that will have your brand name

How to prepare before enrollment

Tip: You cannot proceed

without an active website


Sneak Peak…page 1 of Application


A Good Key Attribute:

★ It should be easily discoverable by your distributors & customers on your packaging, on your website, or in your catalog

★ No two products in your brand should have the same value for the key attribute.

Can use ~

✤ Manufacturer Part Number

✤ Model Number

✤ Catalog Number

✤ Style Number

Key attribute is unique to the product & never changes

Tip: If your key attribute is not unique to your

product, then you will receive an error message when submitting your

application


Get a trademark for your brand & register it with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office so you can use ® next to your private label brand name on your listing.

Since Amazon does not get involved in trademark issues — this empowers you with legal recourse.

Final Recommendation

Tip: Don’t use a trademark symbol such as ® in the application line that says

“Brand Name” since Amazon’s system cannot read them.


Brand Registry & Hijacking: How to Protect Your Amazon Business

Marketing

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