Amazon stands out as a dominant marketplace, offering reach and opportunities for brands to connect with millions of customers worldwide. However, with this potential comes the challenge of protecting your brand from various threats. Ensuring the integrity and reputation of your brand on Amazon is crucial not only for maintaining customer trust but also for keeping market share.
This article will guide you through the essentials of brand protection on Amazon, exploring 3 effective strategies to protect your brand from unscrupulous sellers and highlighting tools that simplify this process.
Amazon and brand protection
When businesses first start selling their products on Amazon, they learn that Amazon’s top priority is the customer’s experience, not their own. So, you have to be aware of Amazon’s policies and know how to modify your operations accordingly. Knowing the guidelines the platform uses for its product listings is also essential.
- Listings on Amazon are considered common property. You can include your offer for a product if it is currently being sold on the marketplace by another seller. Third parties sellers (3P sellers) are free to post their own offers as long as they don’t break any restrictions and sell the same goods.
- If you don’t want other individuals to sell your products on Amazon, there’s nothing you can do. The online retailer will not delete the goods itself, even if you request that your copyrighted images or product description be removed.
- As long as the goods is obtained lawfully, anyone can sell it on Amazon.
- If third parties violate the conditions of their reseller agreements with the manufacturer, Amazon will not take the products off from its marketplace.
For brands, these are sad news, but thankfully, there is also good news. Applying the strategies quoted in the next section of this post will help you safeguard your brand on Amazon.
3 ways to protect your brand from 3P sellers on Amazon
Let’s dive into the 3 ways to improve your brand protection:
Join the Amazon Brand Registry Program
Regardless of the size of your business, you should join the Amazon Brand Registry Program as soon as you start selling on Amazon. Being a member of this program allows you to gain access to brand protection and promotion tools that are not available to third party sellers outside of this program. Here’s a short list:
- Brand analytics
- A dedicated tool for reporting copyright and trademark infringement
- Virtual bundles
- Storefronts
- Brand dashboard
- A+ content
- And many others…
You can use Amazon’s special tool to look for brands using your copyrighted photos and trademarks in their listings when you sign up for the Brand Registry program. Using the program, you may instantly report merchants who violate your intellectual property rights as soon as you find them. Before submitting a claim, you should confirm that the concerned sellers are in fact in violation of Amazon policy.
Remember that even if you sign up for the Brand Registry service, you won’t be able to stop other people from selling your branded goods on Amazon. You will only have greater choice over how they are displayed, though.
Demonstrate the legitimacy of the brand
Even if Amazon accounts for the majority of your sales, you should still keep a close eye to your brand, every product you sell should have the brand name printed on the package. You can use this method to demonstrate who owns your brand and the legitimacy of your goods. Furthermore, fulfilling these requirements is a prerequisite for joining Amazon’s Brand Registry program.
Monitor product listings
Any seller can create and edit product listings on Amazon. This means you should make sure that the listings for your products are correct, current, optimized, and have high-quality images. If your brand is enrolled in the Brand Registry program, the information you state in product listings should take precedence over the changes third-party sellers attempt to make, but this doesn’t always happen.
To avoid potentially bad consequences, beginners could say that you should dedicate a staff member to monitor all listings, but advanced vendors and sellers know that there is a better way to do it, with less money!
In fact, utilize scraping tools to monitor your products Buy Boxes, prices, descriptions and keyword ranking changes, drastically simplifies the process.
Introducing ImportFromWeb, the Google Sheets add-on to efficiently monitor your listings
ImportFromWeb is a Google Sheets add-on that enables to easily extract real-time data from any Amazon product page. The process relies on a simple Google sheets function – named =IMPORTFROMWEB() – that requires 2 parameters: the Amazon product page URL and one or a list of selectors specifying the data points to be extracted. Executing the function outputs the data points requested in a simple table.
With ImportFromWeb you can benchmark competitors, detect content change, monitor prices…on hundreds of listings!
If you want to start monitoring your product listings, feel free contact us to build a Google Sheets solution.
