There’s no escaping the fact that, for some brands, Amazon represents digital retail’s wild west, rife with counterfeiters, unauthorized third party sellers and nefarious selling practices. And while that might be an extreme view of things, it’s certainly true that Amazon itself continues to ramp up efforts to make its marketplaces a safe place to play for brands of all types.
Central to this is Brand Registry, which unlocks a variety of tools – including the Project Zero program and Transparency By Amazon service – that help you build as well as protect your brand, while creating a better customer experience.
In May 2017, Amazon introduced a new and enhanced Brand Registry aimed at helping brand owners to safeguard or protect their registered trademarks. The Brand Registry was also designed to create an accurate and reliable experience for brands’ customers by offering access to image search and proprietary text, along with predictive automation and reporting tools. Sellers who register with the program have more control over their brand on Amazon.
Today, the Brand Registry presents a powerful suite of tools or programs as well as features that verified brand owners can use to protect intellectual property and build their brand presence within Amazon and nurture their business.
Amazon says it’s protecting over 350,000 brands around the world that have enrolled with Amazon Brand Registry. Additionally, according to Amazon, these brands are on average finding and reporting 99 percent fewer suspected infringements compared to the time when Brand Registry hadn’t been launched. Moreover, Amazon stopped over 2.5 million bad actor accounts before they could publish a single product listing for sale while more than 6 billion suspicious bad product listings were blocked before they could even be published to the Amazon store.
One of the key features of Brand Registry is that it offers greater control over product pages on Amazon under a brand name, so customers are likely to see the right information that is associated with a given brand.
A set of search and reporting tools helps simplify the process of finding and identifying potential infringements. These include:
Once a search is complete, it’s possible to submit a report of any potential infringement to Amazon. The Amazon team then reviews the report and takes appropriate action.
Besides the standard proactive measures that Amazon provides, Brand Registry offers additional brand protection. The program utilizes information provided about a brand to help initiate additional predictive protection aimed at identifying and removing potentially bad listings. The more Brand Registry knows about a brand and its IP, the more proactive it will be, with measures including including:
Amazon Brand Registry also plays a key role in brand building, with the ability to use A+/enhanced brand content, use sponsored ads, and take advantage of Amazon Brand Analytics. The latter helps make informed decisions about listings and strategy, with insight into customer and search behaviour.
Before enrolling with Amazon’s Brand Registry, it’s important to know whether or not a brand is eligible. There are certain requirements for enrolment. For example, the brand needs to have an active registered trademark within every country in which it’s being enrolled. Also, the trademark for the brand should feature a text-based or image-based mark including letters, words, or numbers. The enrollee will also need to be able to verify that they’re the rights owner or the authorized agent of the trademark. Once a brand is confirmed as eligible for enrolment, users can log in with Seller or Vendor Central credentials to sign up.
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