Let’s assume your team spots a product listing on Amazon from a seller you don’t recognize. You try to contact the retailer but have no luck reaching them. You double-check, even triple-check the names of your authorized dealers and those companies’ other “doing-business-as” (DBA) names. You search for the seller elsewhere online and try to find the company’s address, key executives, and other details. In all cases, no luck.
You conclude this seller is gaming the system. Maybe they’ve acquired your products unethically from your wholesalers. Or perhaps they’re among your legitimate retail partners but operating under a phony name so they can violate your MAP policy and win some quick sales without jeopardizing their relationship with your brand.
Whatever the story is, you’re convinced you’ve uncovered an unauthorized 3P threat on Amazon. You’re worried that if you don’t deal with them soon, these listings could harm your relationships with other sellers and undermine your brand. What steps can you take right now to stop it?
In this lesson, we’ll review some proven best practices—in step-by-step order—for dealing with the unauthorized sellers listing your products on Amazon.
Note: In the next and final lesson, we’ll discuss the proactive steps you can take to help prevent these things from happening in the first place.
Step 1: Document the Listing
If you spot what appears to be an unauthorized listing of your products on Amazon, your first step should be to document that listing in detail.
This documentation should include grabbing screenshots of the listing page, the shopping-cart page, and the seller’s main page (if one exists).
Your documentation could provide evidence (if applicable) that the seller is violating your copyrighted intellectual property. It could also demonstrate that the retailer is violating Amazon’s marketplace rules, such as encouraging the shopper to click away from Amazon for the best deal or using inaccurate product details to mislead consumers.
Even if this documentation doesn’t persuade Amazon to remove the offending sales listing, you will also have it as evidence if you choose to take legal action yourself against the seller.
Pro tip: Also check for possible misuse of ratings and reviews.
Sometimes a rogue retailer that has just begun publishing phony product detail pages will attempt to create the illusion of legitimacy by also posting phony customer reviews to those pages, or paying others to pretend they have purchased the products and leave fake positive feedback.
When you spot an unauthorized 3P on Amazon, check out their customer reviews and document any that seem fraudulent (which you can then report to Amazon for investigation). This might be another way to shut down a crooked seller listing your products on Amazon without your permission.
Step 2: Conduct a Test Buy
As part of your broader brand protection strategy, you will want to “serialize” your inventory to help track your products through your resale channel, from your in-house sales teams all the way to the end-user consumer.
Assuming you’ve taken this step, when you spot an unauthorized seller’s listing on Amazon, you’ll want to conduct a test buy, so you can inspect the product and determine based on the serial number (or other unique identifiers) where it came from in your distribution chain.
You might find the party that sold this inventory to an unauthorized seller is a distributor, wholesaler, a retailer in your Authorized Dealer Network, or even someone within your company violating your own rules.
If the product is actually a counterfeit, you will learn that as well, because it will not have your unique ID number. In this case, you will have a strong case to enlist Amazon’s help in removing the listing and taking action against the seller, because the company aggressively targets counterfeiters on its marketplace.
There’s an important caveat to the test-buy strategy.
In some cases, unauthorized retailers use the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) service, in which Amazon warehouses a seller’s inventory and then ships it to buyers when orders are placed. In one sense, this is good news for your brand, because it means at least one aspect of the customer experience—fulfillment—will be handled professionally. Amazon, after all, runs a world-class shipping and delivery operation.
But on the other hand, if you’re suspicious of a given seller listing your products, FBA can be a hindrance to your ability to discover who the seller truly is. With a test buy, you are hoping to learn more information about the identity of a seller through the details on the packaging the company ships to you. But when they use Fulfillment by Amazon, unauthorized 3Ps can continue to enjoy their anonymity because their products are actually shipped by Amazon and will show up at the buyer’s location with only Amazon’s return address and contact details.
This is why we recommend using your test-buy strategy in conjunction with product serialization. Let’s say you’ve serialized your inventory, assigning unique codes or identifiers to each item. Even if a product comes shipped to you from an Amazon distribution center and not directly from your questionable 3P seller, you can still at least trace the test product back to the distributor or wholesaler who sold it in the first place. If you have an Authorized Dealer Program, you can request that your distributor turn over the record of that bulk sale and help you locate the true identity of the questionable retailer.
You can then take appropriate action against that distributor for selling to an unauthorized retailer, and aggressively pursue the retailer directly.
Step 3: Contact Amazon
At this point, you’re certain that you’ve found an unauthorized 3P selling your products. Now it’s time to take all documentation you’ve compiled that demonstrates the seller is violating either the law or Amazon’s rules for seller behavior, and submit that information to Amazon’s seller teams.
Remember, your case for enlisting Amazon’s help removing a seller will be strongest if you can present evidence that the seller is also violating Amazon’s own guidelines. That could include:
- Evidence the listing violates your intellectual property rights
One example would be a fake product detail page built on a phony ASIN for your product.
- Evidence the product is a counterfeit
You might be able to demonstrate this after a test buy, where you open and photograph the product and can document it is not authentic.
- Evidence the seller’s listing is misleading to consumers and could actually defraud them
For example, can you show Amazon your product includes rebates or warranties available only through authorized dealers, and that consumers won’t know from the listing that this seller can’t make good on those benefits?
As we noted above, if you can produce evidence that the seller is generating fraudulent customer reviews, you will also want to present that evidence to Amazon. Everything you can do to strengthen your case that the seller is manipulating the Amazon marketplace will increase the chances that Amazon’s seller teams will jump in to help.
How does Amazon Brand Registry fit into this strategy?
Participating in the Amazon Brand Registry program can help you here in a few ways.
First, it will give you more sophisticated monitoring tools that will help your team more quickly and reliably spot unauthorized sellers.
Second, as a registered “brand owner,” you will often receive higher priority from Amazon itself when you submit evidence of a seller that might be violating their rules.
And third, Amazon itself runs automated searches continuously, even using predictive analytics and other sophisticated AI tools, for illegal product listings of its Brand Registry participants. This program is designed to protect Amazon and its customers—not your brand—but being a part of the Brand Registry does increase your brand’s profile with Amazon’s seller teams. That can’t hurt.
Caution: At TrackStreet, we know that if a brand files too many complaints about unauthorized sellers, the marketplace will de-prioritize future complaints from that brand. This means you want to be selective about when to submit a report to Amazon about a rogue seller. Moreover, you do not want to file reports for issues you know Amazon is not likely to act on, such as a seller violating your company’s MAP policy or an unauthorized retailer that you can’t prove is violating your IP rights.
Step 4: Issue a Warning to the Seller
Assuming you can find the seller’s real identity—or at least a way to contact them directly—you will want to issue a warning notice to them directly. Your warning should let the company know they are listing your products without your permission and that you are prepared to take legal action against them if they continue doing so.
As we’ve noted in previous lessons, you’re in a much stronger legal position when pursuing unauthorized retailers than when issuing warnings against your authorized dealers. This is because, assuming you have a MAP or other reseller pricing policy in place, you need to be careful to avoid references to your resale pricing rules in all communications with your official resale partners. If your team crosses the antitrust line in any of those communications—even inadvertently—they can later be used against your company.
But with an unauthorized seller, you have no such risk of antitrust issues. That means you are free to be as aggressive as you’d like when threatening such companies for selling your products without your permission
Step 5: Alert the Right People to the Problem
Time matters in these instances. If your legitimate retail partners are the first to spot an unauthorized seller getting away with listing your products on Amazon—which also means they’re likely undercutting your honorable dealers—this can jeopardize your most important sales relationships.
You will want to get proactive here and let your authorized retailers know you’ve encountered a rogue seller on Amazon and that you’re taking immediate and aggressive steps to resolve the problem.
You’ll also want to send notices to the appropriate people at your company, or even your legal counsel, so you can take additional steps to remove the offending listing (or at least to be prepared with answers if and when you start receiving angry calls from your legitimate resale partners).
Step 6: Take Appropriate Action Against All Offenders
At this point, you now have the unauthorized seller on your company’s radar and you’ve taken some preliminary steps to deal with the problem. Assuming you’ve serialized your inventory and have been able to trace the source of the “leak” that led to this 3P acquiring your products in the first place, you will now need to deal with that leak.
This process should take place in parallel with the other steps you’re taking to enlist Amazon’s help removing the offending listings. You need to move quickly here on all fronts. We’ve listed these steps in sequence, but it’s worth noting that you’ll want to handle this step at the same time as you’re compiling documentation to build a case for Amazon against the rogue seller.
If the source of the problem was a wholesaler who sold your inventory to a retailer not on your list of approved vendors, you will need to talk with that wholesaler, find out how the leak happened, and issue whatever consequences are called for according to your distribution agreement.
Perhaps your investigation will reveal the leak was the result of an internal sales rep in your company either innocently selling inventory to a dishonest retailer, or knowingly colluding with that retailer (maybe to meet a quarterly sales quota). Whatever the case, you’ll need to take appropriate action against these offenders. You’ll probably also want to use this opportunity as a training opportunity for the rest of your internal sales team.
Finally, you’ll want to start developing a plan for any legal action against the seller beyond that initial warning letter. How far are you willing to take the issue? Will you engage an attorney and file suit? Will you wait a certain period of time to see if your warning notice frightens the retailer into removing the offending listings from Amazon? Now is the time to make those decisions.