Protect Your Brand With Amazon Brand Registry

Amazon Brand Registry is the perfect solution for sellers seeking to protect their brand from scammers.

As you may know, Amazon is an open marketplace, which means that anyone can join. Most likely, if your listings start to gain traction, you’ll catch the attention of “black hat sellers”.

Brands like yours can be at risk of a number of listing threats, such as:

• duplicate listings
• copyright
• trademark infringement
• counterfeiters

Luckily, with Amazon Brand Registry you can protect your intellectual property. It also grants you access to several tools to better showcase your brand. In this article, we’ll go over some of the most important aspects of this comprehensive program so you can take advantage of the benefits Brand Registry has to offer.

What Is Amazon Brand Registry?

Amazon Brand Registry’s main goal is to help sellers protect their brand 24/7. With this program, infractions don’t go unnoticed. More than 95% of notices raised by Brand Registry participants are actioned within 24 hours.

130,000 brands attest to the effectiveness of this program. However, you must keep in mind that the best way to protect your reputation on Amazon is to trademark your brand name and logo; this is mandatory to join Amazon’s Brand Registry Program.

Registering is pretty straightforward, and it’s a one-time process done from the Seller Central.

Brand Protection Benefits

Sellers joining the program will enjoy the following benefits:

• Brand Protection

Amazon blocks listings that appear to be an infringement on brands’ IP automatically.

• Brand Representation

It helps making your brand representation accurate. Owners have full control over the use of their brand name on their Amazon listings.

• Access to Useful Tools

Use global search, image search and bulk ASIN search to be able to find potential infringements quick and easy.

• Brand Building

It offers tools for brands to promote themselves in a more effective way on Amazon. Sellers have access to tools like Enhanced Brand Content, Stores, Sponsored Brand Ads, and the Brand Dashboard.

In a nutshell, with Brand Registration, you can:

• Add and manage branded products.
• Get rid of counterfeit products in the marketplace that might be associated to your brand.
• Verify that the information about the branded product on the listed page is correct.

Brand Registry 2.0

As we mentioned above, one of the requirements to join the program is to have a trademark for your brand. Amazon launched Brand Registry 2.0 to prove ownership of your products and to and to reinforce brand protection measures.

Sellers enrolled in Brand Registry 2.0 will automatically have access to proprietary image and text search, better protection, search for any brand violations and more control over their listings.

Private Label Brand Protection

Private Label Products are items and services created by a seller and branded by another company. A popular example is Amazon Basics.

If you sell Private Label, you can join Amazon Brand Registry to protect your brand. Just keep in mind that you’ll need to have your own website, integrate it to Amazon, and make sure your logo is present on the product and packaging. Your contact information should also be visible.

If you consider your ASINs are likely to catch the attention of black hat sellers, with Brand Registry you could gate them.

Brand gating or brand restriction prevents third-party sellers from listing products “weirdly similar” to yours without your permission. They’ll need to meet certain criteria set by Amazon before even attempting to list these products.

Retail Arbitrage Brand Protection

Retail Arbitrage is when you get products at a discount price or you find a special deal to then sell it and make some profit. Amazon recommends a profit of $3 per product to make retail arbitrage worth it. There are no suppliers or manufacturers involved in retail arbitrage. You buy directly from a store.

Regarding Brand Registry, you need to be careful about selling a brand restricted product without approval. In this case, your listing can be flagged by Amazon.

Before listing the product, you want to sell, verify that it isn’t part of the brand registry already. Amazon can mistake you for an unauthorized seller and your account will be taken down.

SEO and Brand Protection

Another threats that sellers have to deal with is the content of their product listings. Sometimes, unethical sellers manage to modify the text and images of your listing to make them irrelevant or to even fill it with offensive content.

Your SEO may be at risk in your listing if it’s altered by a third-party. Some techniques can include keyword stuffing, cloaking, buying spam links to point to your competitor’s site, spin texts to create new ones easily, etc.

Amazon has specific guidelines and these types of techniques are grounds to keep your account suspended for weeks.

If these actions are taken in a legitimate way by a competitor, then they won’t be considered to break with Amazon’s guidelines. This means reputation strategies or aggressive campaigns are not against the rules.

Project Zero

Project Zero was created by Amazon to provide better protection and autonomy to brands. Its main goal is to have zero counterfeiting within the marketplace.

This self-service feature allows you to remove yourself from listings that use your brand and image, letting you identify, with a unique code, each unit of product sold by a counterfeit brand to help decrease the rate of hijacking on listings and other black hat techniques that could damage your brand’s reputation.

Brand Registry Eligibility and Requirements

You need to have an active and registered trademark in the country you are selling in in order to enroll in Brand Registry and you need to be an Amazon Seller. The trademark should be in the form of a text-based mark or an image-based mark.

Trademarks need to be issued by a government trademark office in the United States, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia, India, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, the European Union, or the United Arab Emirates.

How to Enroll

Register your brand here: https://brandservices.amazon.com

Amazon will require to fill out this information:

• Brand name with an active, registered trademark
• Government-registered trademark number
• List of product categories that apply to your brand
• List of countries where your brand’s products are manufactured and distributed.

Then, Amazon will need to verify your information and ask you to provide a contact that is associated to the given trademark. Note that this is a process that can take from 24 hours to several weeks.

If you’re selling Private Label, Amazon strongly suggests that you register your brand with the program.

Getting your trademark is the longest part of the process. Consider it may take several months for the trademark to be completed.

Closing Thoughts

Selling counterfeits and hijacking listings are common practices on Amazon. Unfortunately, most sellers are prone to suffering from the consequences of these unethical practices. This, of course, leads to bad reviews from customers and damages their hard-earned reputation.

Brand Protection is a serious thing. Therefore, keep in mind that if you are trying to build your brand and increase your online presence, you may want to get access to tools that can help you prevent any listing hijacking.

Remember to constantly update and check the SEO of your listing, pay attention to the competition, and keep an eye out for any suspicious activity.

Guest Author: AMZ Advisers is a full-service eCommerce consultancy focused on creating growth opportunities for brands, manufacturers, and private labels across the US, Europe, Canada, and Asia. The AMZ Advisers team has been able to achieve incredible growth on the Amazon platform for their clients by optimizing and managing their accounts and creating in-depth content marketing strategies.