Lesson 2: Common Tricks and Scams of Unauthorized Amazon Sellers

In the first lesson, we discussed the many ways your business can suffer from retailers who aren’t part of your Authorized Dealer Network offering your product on Amazon without your permission. 

But how are these unauthorized sellers able to list your brand’s products on Amazon in the first place? Doesn’t Amazon itself have mechanisms to prevent this from happening? In the next lesson, we’ll review when Amazon will step in to remove an unauthorized retailer—and under what circumstance they won’t intervene at all.

For now, though, let’s look at some of the common scams unauthorized Amazon sellers use to sell your products—often without your company even knowing they’re doing it. 

1. The Phony-ASIN Trick

You can think of this scam as a rogue seller hiding its offer of your products in plain sight on Amazon.

Imagine a retailer your business has no relationship with gets its hands on your products and wants to sell them on Amazon at below-MAP levels, to steal sales from your legitimate retailers. If they list your products under your true ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number), they’ll face two problems.

First, they will have more competition from other sellers, because your authorized retailers are all using your true ASIN. As we noted in Lesson 1, every unique product gets its own ASIN on Amazon, and all sellers of that item make their offers on that page.

Second, by using the real ASIN to list your product, this rogue retailer faces a better chance of your company discovering what they’re up to and going after them.

As noted in Lesson 1, one option rogue sellers have when selling a product on Amazon without the brand’s permission is to create a fake or duplicate ASIN for the product, allowing them to publish a brand-new product detail page.

This scam solves both problems at once. The rogue seller has less competition for your products; in fact, they can own the Buy Box. They’re also more likely to remain hidden from your view, if you search the Amazon marketplace for your products by ASIN. 

Even if you are using MAP monitoring software (if you’ve signed up for a lesser-quality service), you might still not catch these 3Ps if the software itself searches only for ASINs.

At TrackStreet, we advise brands that there should be a one-to-one relationship between your ASINs and UPCs. If new ASINs pop up when TrackStreet crawls the site looking for products (we search by UPC, product name, SKU, image, and other product details to make matches), we know this likely means someone is selling your product, and further investigation is required. 

2. The Phony-Company-Name Trick

With this scam, the rogue seller isn’t necessarily hiding its offer from you—the company might even present its offer on your product’s true Amazon listing page, alongside your Authorized Dealers. In this case, the seller is hiding its own identity by operating under a fake company name.

While masking their identity, these rogue sellers can undercut your legitimate retail partners on Amazon by offering your product below your MAP-approved levels. That will allow them to pull in more sales than your honorable retailers, at least for a while. Then, when your company spots the problem—or worse, one of your retail partners calls you to complain—the unauthorized seller can often remain hidden because you won’t know who they are or how to pursue them.

Some unauthorized Amazon 3P will combine scams 1 and 2 above. They’ll create a phony ASIN for your product and use it to build a fake product detail page where they can offer your products undetected for a while. Even if you find that page, you’ll have difficulty tracking the retailer down because it’s operating under a false business name.

Note: It is not Amazon’s policy to intervene anytime a manufacturer or brand complains that a retailer is selling the company’s products without its permission. As we’ll discuss later in this course, Amazon tends to view this as a supply-chain dispute, which means in most cases you’ll need to engage lawyers or investigators for help. 

3. The New-Alias Trick

Imagine your brand faces the situation we just described in Scam 2. You’ve found a rogue retailer listing your products on Amazon under a phony company name. 

So, you start taking action to get that seller removed from the Amazon marketplace. You contact Amazon Seller Central for help. But they decline to get involved, and they give you two reasons.

First, the rogue seller’s offer appears on the official product detail page, which means the company didn’t use your copyrighted content without your permission to create a fake detail page. That means you don’t have a case for intellectual-property theft, which is something that would prompt Amazon to intervene.

Second, you can’t prove the retailer is offering anything other than your actual product, unaltered. That’s the other reason Amazon might help a brand remove a retailer—because the company is listing a counterfeit or altered product.

So, you have no choice but to engage outside help. You bring in a law firm and investigators to hunt down the company’s owners, address, and other information. You have your attorneys threaten them with lawsuits. Perhaps you file a case in court and win a judgment. And finally, the retailer pulls down its listings of your products on Amazon.

It seems as though you’ve won. But then…

The company simply starts the process all over again under, as a “New Amazon Seller,” using yet another phony name. It’s the rogue-retailer version of the whack-a-mole game.

We’ve found that this is one of the favorite methods of unauthorized 3Ps because, unless brands have a method for quickly finding out who these companies actually are, they can stay in business indefinitely. It doesn’t take long to create a new Amazon seller account and post a new listing page for the same product you’ve been selling under another company name.

4. The Altered-Product-Name Trick

Here’s yet another unique twist on unauthorized 3Ps’ strategy of hiding from you in broad daylight. With this dirty-trick variation, the rogue retailer lists your product under a new detail page with a slightly varied version of your product name. In many cases, it will be close enough to the product’s actual name that a consumer will mistake it for the real thing—but altered such that your team won’t find it in a search on Amazon.

This is another reason we at TrackStreet believe manufacturers need an automated brand protection platform that monitors their products on marketplaces like Amazon using a wider range of criteria—such as sales copy, keywords, and even proprietary images.

Unfortunately, because so few manufacturers have such a brand protection solution in place to catch these rogue sellers, unauthorized 3Ps find great success using this approach. 

5. Creating Multiple Phony ASINs for the Same Product

The strategy behind this dirty trick is to push down legitimate sellers’ listings in Amazon search results.

These rogue sellers are taking advantage of the fact that Amazon allows for multiple ASINs on similar but not identical products, such as products with different colors or sizes. In reality, this is just a clever way to “hog” the top search results and crowd out the authorized retailers who are legitimately selling these same products, by pushing those listings lower in the search results.

Some of these clever rogue sellers will also create multiple phony ASINs for the same product not under the name of a single retailer but under the names of several sellers—all existing in name only, but in reality, under the operation of that single unauthorized 3P. 

If you encounter such an issue, you should report it to Amazon immediately. Unfortunately, though, without an automated system for continuously scanning the Amazon marketplace for your products—not only by ASIN but also based on other search criteria—you might never discover these 3Ps in the first place.  

6. Using Exaggerated and Misleading Product Details

Sometimes, a rogue retailer selling your products on Amazon will intentionally include inaccurate, exaggerated product specs and other details in the phony product detail pages they create to lure customers away from legitimate retailers also offering those same products.

For example, they might add an untrue statement about your product in the features section or use inaccurate (but impressive!) photos to imply that the product has characteristics it actually does not. They may try all sorts of tricks to give a shopper a false impression of your product so the customer buys from that reseller instead of all of the others on Amazon offering the product.

This scam poses a uniquely dangerous problem for your company—even worse than the other scams we’ve already reviewed. By intentionally misleading people shopping on Amazon for your product, these unauthorized sellers significantly increase the chances that customers will come away from these purchases disappointed, frustrated, and even feeling cheated.

When this happens, many of these customers will go right back to Amazon to write negative reviews about your products. Worse, they will often not distinguish between the retailer and the manufacturer. Their negative reviews will be attached to your product, potentially undermining future sales from other customers, upsetting your legitimate retail partners on Amazon, and harming your brand over time.  

7. Switching Marketplaces When Caught

Imagine: You catch an unauthorized retailer listing your products on Amazon.com in violation of the guidelines you’ve created to protect your brand and your other resellers. They’re using misleading product specs. They’ve rewritten your sales copy, introduced errors, and are offering your products well below your MAP-approved prices—meaning they’re unfairly luring sales from your Authorized Dealers, who are honoring your MAP policy. 

Your enforcement team contacts this reseller, threatening legal action if they don’t remove your product listings from Amazon. And they comply. For the time being, your company believes it has won this battle. You’ve stopped a rogue seller from offering your brand’s products on Amazon.

Problem is, at the same time they’ve recreated those listings, violations and all, on another digital marketplace. If your company lets its Amazon-enforcement guard down for any period of time, that rogue seller might resort to Scam 3 (The New-Alias Trick) and reinvent itself under a new name on Amazon again.

Quiz time.