Lesson 5: Is Amazon Brand Registry a Useful Weapon Against Unauthorized Sellers?

In Lesson 3, we explained why you can’t count on Amazon itself to help you remove listings of your products from retailers that aren’t affiliated with your company. Then, in Lesson 4, we reviewed the reasons your MAP policy won’t stop these unauthorized sellers, either.

At this point, you might be wondering: Will anything protect our company against unauthorized product listings on Amazon?

The good news is that there are tools available to help you. One is an online brand protection platform that monitors your brand’s presence on Amazon.com (and across the web) 24/7, and automatically takes action when it spots rogue listings or other violations of your company’s guidelines. 

Another tool that can help you in this struggle is a program developed by Amazon itself, called Amazon Brand Registry. This program is not a silver bullet that can prevent all unauthorized sellers from using the Amazon marketplace to sell your products. But Amazon Brand Registry does include several services that can help you reduce the number of these listings and minimize the damage these rogue sellers can cause your brand.

In this lesson, we’ll review:

• What Amazon Brand Registry is.

• What not to expect from this program.

• How you can use Brand Registry to minimize unauthorized sellers on Amazon.

 What Is Amazon Brand Registry?

Amazon developed its Brand Registry program to give manufacturers and brand owners more control over their content published on the Amazon marketplace. The company describes this program as a way to help brands like yours “protect your intellectual property and create an accurate and trusted experience for customers on Amazon.”

Here’s a brief overview of how the program works:

You apply for and are accepted into the Amazon Brand Registry.

Assuming you’re the legitimate brand owner and have a registered trademark or other legal means to verify it, applying to this program is relatively simple, and the approval process generally takes just days or a couple of weeks at most.

When you’re accepted, you will sign in to your Amazon Brand Registry dashboard and enroll your brands.

You’ll want to add all brands for which you want enhanced content control across Amazon and which you’ll want to monitor the marketplace for unauthorized or counterfeit listings. 

This step should take just a few minutes. All you’ll need to supply is your brand’s name, its registered trademark, its product category (for example, apparel), and a list of countries where the products are manufactured and distributed. 

As the recognized “brand owner,” you’ll receive several benefits when listing your content on Amazon.

For example, Amazon will give you greater control over how your content is published across the site. You will also have the ability to designate employees or even specific retail partners as “agents” of your brand, who will then also have the same privileges of the Brand Registry when publishing content for your brand on Amazon.

What Not to Expect from Amazon Brand Registry

As you can see from the quote above, which we pulled from the Brand Registry’s landing page, Amazon developed this program to leverage brands’ help in minimizing inaccurate or misleading content on its marketplace. Brand Registry is primarily about elevating the overall quality of product information on Amazon and removing counterfeit products, not about helping brands gain tighter controls over their resale channels.

In other words, if you choose to sign up for Amazon Brand Registry to help you reduce unauthorized listings (and we recommend you do so) you need to understand upfront what the program won’t do for you. A few examples:

• Joining the Amazon Brand Registry does not mean Amazon will remove listings or advertisements that violate your MAP or other reseller pricing policy.
• The Brand Registry won’t help you remove listings from retailers or wholesalers selling your products in violation of other aspects of your distribution guidelines or policies. 
• Participating in Amazon Brand Registry will not give you the ability to pull down sales listings from authorized retailers yourself. You will still need to report these violations to Amazon and ask for their help.

 3 Ways Amazon Brand Registry Can Help You Minimize Unauthorized Amazon Sellers

So, how can joining Amazon Brand Registry—particularly the updated Brand Registry 2.0—help your company protect against unauthorized 3Ps?

1. Access to advanced tools to spot unauthorized sellers

Although Amazon developed the software tools for Brand Registry primarily to spot intellectual-property theft, you can use them to identify unauthorized 3Ps, as these companies are also often violating your IP rights when they list your inventory on Amazon.

If you can build a case that an unauthorized 3P’s listing represents an illegal use of your company’s trademarks or other intellectual property, you’ll often find Amazon much more likely to help you remove the listing and even go after the seller.

Here are some of the key tools you’ll find helpful in spotting rogue sellers, which Amazon makes available only to Brand Registry participants:

• Global search:

Search for content in different Amazon stores from the same screen without ever having to navigate away.

• Image search:

Find product listings on Amazon that match your products or logos using images.

• Bulk ASIN search:

Search for a list of ASINs or product URLs in bulk to explore and report potentially infringing content fast.

Note: Another important benefit of bulk ASIN search is that if you have multiple listings for the same product on the Amazon marketplace, this search can help you find those duplicate listings and merge them into a single main ASIN page.

By combining several sales listing pages, you are also able to combine the number of recorded sales on Amazon into one main product page, and that higher number of sales will help improve your placement in shoppers’ search results. 

It also helps you eliminate outdated or incorrect product information that could be lingering on old Amazon sales pages and gives you recourse if resellers create unauthorized product listings under new ASINs. 

2. A dedicated support team to help you prevent unauthorized 3Ps

Again, this wasn’t Amazon’s main reason for developing the Amazon Brand Registry or updating the program to Brand Registry 2.0. The company is primarily interested in keeping counterfeiters and copyright infringers off of its marketplace. 

But the good news is that when you can align your interests (getting rid of unauthorized 3Ps) with Amazon’s interests (keeping IP violations off of its platform), you’ll find the Brand Registry program very helpful.

In fact, Amazon has its proprietary software monitoring the site at all times, applying Amazon’s predictive analytics tools to identifying potential IP violations, and going after the offenders. The Brand Registry program even has a dedicated team monitoring Amazon.com and proactively investigating potential violations.

This means that if you’re part of the Brand Registry program, Amazon itself will be continuously monitoring its marketplace for illegal listings of your products and pulling down those listings—all without your company having to ask. 

3. Enhanced brand content features that let you set your listings apart from those of unauthorized 3Ps

Applying for Amazon Brand Registry might be worth the effort just for access to the “enhanced brand content” feature alone.

This set of tools, available only to companies signed up for the Brand Registry, allows you to create rich content for your sales listings that other brands cannot. And although it wasn’t designed specifically for this purpose, using enhanced brand content will allow you (or your legitimate resale partners) to create sales listings that are much more compelling for consumers than the standard pages an unauthorized 3P will be limited to creating.

A word of caution: As we’ve previously stated, Amazon tends not to involve itself in manufacturer complaints against retailers, as long as those retailers are selling authentic items and not doing anything the brand can prove is illegal. This is why we say signing up for Amazon Brand Registry, although a worthwhile strategy, will not be a bulletproof defense against unauthorized 3Ps on Amazon.

Another word of caution: A related strategy you might have heard of is to apply for Amazon’s “Restricted Brand” status. Under this program, your company will provide to Amazon a list of sellers allowed to sell either specific products or any of your products on the marketplace, and Amazon will not allow any other sellers to do so unless you add them to the list. Brands on this list are typically in categories vulnerable to counterfeiting: luxury apparel, high-end handbags, consumer electronics, etc.

Unless your company is trying to prevent counterfeiters from selling phony versions of your products on Amazon, this might be too aggressive of an approach when dealing with unauthorized retailers. Sellers often complain that Amazon prevents them from listing certain products on the marketplace even though they are members in good standing of the manufacturer’s Authorized Dealer Network.

Quiz time.