3 Steps to Protect Your Brand on Amazon

Having your brand unprotected on Amazon opens your product to be controlled by any Amazon sellers with good or bad intentions. They can change listing, photos and create duplicated product pages of the same items. But the worst is that is very hard to enforce MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) or counterfeit products.

In a nutshell, they can be a real mess for your brand, your loyal Bricks & Mortar vendors and your customers. So where should you begin with brand protection?

Here are 3 simple steps to keep in mind to start that process:

1. Define your brand protection goals

The first step to creating an effective brand protection strategy is to think about your goal. Why do you want to protect your brand, do you want to reinforce the MAP (Minimum Advertising Price), do you want to protect your existing Brick & Mortar vendor? Protect your customers from the harms of counterfeit products? That few of the main questions you should ask prior start that process.

When you are ready, you can start the process with Amazon Brand Services:

https://brandservices.amazon.com/

2. Get the Legal Compliant materials

In order to achieve your goal, you will need to have all your legal tools on hand, i.e. be sure your trademark and brand portfolio is up to date. That means you have all the assets (logo, naming, etc) and all the trademark application process is done with the appropriate office.

USPTO (the United States Patent and Trademark Office)

You will need those assets to create the brand registry on Amazon as well to establish legally-compliant material to be able to request to remove unauthorized and counterfeit products sold on Amazon by a rogue seller.

For example, you can have quality control and satisfaction guarantee policy documents requested to "ungate" your product for Seller who they want to sell on Amazon. That way, the rogue seller will need to request it from you in order to be able to sell your product.

3. Monitor MAP and Rogue Seller

You will need to police the situation for your brand. it will be important to spot unauthorized sellers, MAP violations, or potentially counterfeit items and be able to contact Amazon and the seller to reinforce your brand policies. For that, you can use software that scans Amazon constantly by using your ASIN to identify what is happening and if a new seller appears and starts selling your product with a big discount that affects the margin of your other vendors.

This is the main step to begin to protect your brand on Amazon. Keep in mind those rules can change over time and it important to seek advice and work with your vendor to protect the brand.