As many manufacturers, OEMs and brands have learned the hard way when they discover retailers violating their policies on Amazon.com, Amazon itself typically takes a hands-off role when it comes to policing who’s selling what, and for how much, on its marketplace — unless a retailer violates Amazon’s own selling policies.
Of course, a trusted Internet brand protection expert will know which steps to take on your behalf to help your brand address violations of your resale or advertising policies on Amazon — either by contacting the sellers directly with a properly worded warning, or taking the matter directly to Amazon’s Seller Performance Team.
But if you try, for example, to reverse a MAP violation alone — without the help of a MAP enforcement expert — you’ll probably find it extremely difficult to get Amazon to take any action on your behalf. Which is just one of many reasons we argue: Don’t try to handle your MAP enforcement alone.
However, even though Amazon typically declines to take sides (or action of any kind) in pricing disputes between manufacturers and retailers selling their products, the marketplace clearly has an interest in ensuring that only high-quality, accurate product information — and honorable, trustworthy retailers — appear on the Amazon marketplace.
With that in mind, the recently updated Amazon Brand Registry is a valuable brand protection program for manufacturers, OEMs and other “brand owners” who sell their products on Amazon. Here’s why, even though this program won’t necessarily protect you against retailers who violate your pricing policies, it’s still a valuable tool for protecting your brand in other ways.
2 benefits of the amazon brand registry
1. It elevates your product content above all other sources.
When you enroll in the Amazon Brand Registry, the marketplace elevates the authority of product content you submit over that of any reseller.
In fact, when you create new content for your product listings (sales copy, keywords for tagging, images), Amazon’s team won’t even need to review or approve such content; because you’ve already been vetted as the brand owner, you’ll be able to automatically publish your new product content to Amazon.com immediately.
2. It can help stop and even prevent unauthorized listings of your products and counterfeit items being sold under your name.
You might have heard that the Amazon Brand Registry does not allow you as the brand owner to directly remove pages advertising your products by unauthorized resellers or even sellers you know to be counterfeiters. And this is true.
But that doesn’t mean enrolling in the program won’t help you stop these problems — and possibly even prevent future violations from happening.
First of all, when you’re the brand owner and you file a claim with Amazon for copyright infringement claim or other type of intellectual property against your brand, Amazon will be much faster to respond and much more likely to remove the listing. They know you’re the brand owner, after all, and that gives much more credibility to your claim that someone is selling your products on the marketplace illegally.
The second way the brand registry can help prevent these issues is that when you — as the brand owner — report suspected intellectual property rights violations that you find on Amazon.com, those reports are fed into Amazon’s predictive analysis system, helping Amazon identify such violations more easily in the future and possibly even preventing them from ever being published in the marketplace.
PLEASE NOTE: As Amazon explains on its brand registry page, even if you were already enrolled in an earlier version of the brand registry, the company suggests you re-enroll. So whether you are new to this program or just renewing your application as the “brand owner” of your products, signing up is definitely the smart move.
You can start the Amazon Brand Registry enrollment process here.
And if you’d like to learn about an automated brand protection platform that can help you with all aspects of safeguarding your pricing policies and brand reputation — including help with Amazon Brand Registry — schedule your free demo.
