So, you have finally made your mark on Amazon by making your brand successful and popular. Congratulations! But now it is time to watch out for the unscrupulous sellers who try to take a free dive into the pool of your popularity.
If you are a successful and fairly popular seller on Amazon, the chances of having unethical businesses and sellers trying to copy your brand or cause harm to it in one way or the other are not too farfetched. And when it comes to protecting your precious brand, you absolutely cannot afford to ignore it or act as if this would never to you. Because it most certainly could! And you don’t only need to be prepared for it, but you need to take every possible step to avoid it.
Online brand protection is in no way a piece of cake. It requires a lot of effort and a well-thought strategy. So, to make it a little easier for you, we have created this step-by-step guide for protecting your brand on Amazon. So, without further ado, let’s have a look at these steps!
Table of Contents
1. Trademark Your Brand
The first and the most important thing that you should do to protect your brand from the claws of unauthorized sellers is to trademark its name and logo. Amazon trademark will give you more legal rights and will enable you to seek lawful protection across the country. It is also something that you need to have if you want to register your brand in the Amazon Brand Registry.
2. Enroll Your Brand in The Amazon Brand Registry
As soon as you have a trademark, your very next step of the online brand protection strategy should be to get your brand enrolled in the Amazon Brand Registry program. While it doesn’t make your brand 100% immune to the tactics of unethical sellers, it does add an extra layer of protection.
The program prevents other sellers from making changes to your product detail pages and listings. It boosts your IP protection by allowing you to report IP infringers in an easy and quick manner. Not only that, the program always gives priority to the data of a registered brand over the others, which means your products will rank higher on Amazon over other third-party or unregistered sellers. You also get the authority to control your product detail pages, determine how your product information appears, and also get control over your products marketing.
Sounds pretty good, right? You can get more details about the Amazon Brand Registry program and eligibility criteria on Amazon website.
3. Have a Unique Logo and Packaging
When there are so many dishonest sellers present all around the Amazon marketplace, trying to make a profit by copying your brand and products, having a common logo that is easy to duplicate doesn’t help. Try to create products and packaging that cannot be faked easily.
Also, make sure to attach your logo to the products as well as the packaging so that they are covered by Copyright under US Law.
4. Use an Amazon Listing Alerts Service
Product listings of successful brands are the favorite things of the unethical sellers to mess with. So you need to invest in a good online brand protection service that monitors your Amazon product listings and alerts you as soon as something fishy happens.
These services are extremely beneficial if you want to monitor and protect your listings constantly. If another seller tries to hop on your listing or change your product description, pictures, sell knock-off products, etc., these services will send you an immediate notification so that you can quickly deal with it.
5. Use Amazon Transparency Program
Although it is costly, Amazon Transparency is a terrific program for protecting your brand from sellers who want to earn off your profits by selling poor-quality counterfeits of your products.
This program provides a distinct barcode to all the products of the registered sellers. The barcode verifies your products as originals and helps a lot in preventing other sellers from copying or selling a knock-off version of your original product.
Final Thoughts
Having a 100% foolproof strategy to protect your brand on Amazon– or anywhere on the internet, for that matter, is almost impossible today. All you can do for your online brand protection is to stay alert and adopt all the preventive measures you can. We know that it is an added-burden, requires a substantial amount of money, and is a time-consuming process, but looking at all the tremendous efforts that go into making a brand successful, we say it’s totally worth it!
