According to market research firm eMarketer, as of July 2018, Amazon generated 49.1% of total online retail sales in the United States, accounting for 5% of total retail sales in the United States. This is a very impressive number, and it shows no signs of stopping growth in the short term.
However, Amazon’s amazing growth has not always brought opportunities to retailers and companies that manufacture products in themselves, but on the contrary, it has also brought them a lot of trouble. As Amazon’s users increase, many retailers have found that entering Amazon’s ecosystem to sell products can enable them to reach as many buyers as possible with minimal effort, and retailers only need to pay a certain fee to ask Amazon to deliver products for them.
Aspiring retailers have also found that if they can purchase some private label products or branded products (whether genuine or not) and sell them on Amazon, they can earn considerable income. This has caused considerable problems for professional retailers and brands that sell products through these professional retailers.
So what exactly are these unauthorized sellers causing trouble for professional retailers and brands?
First, many unauthorized sellers are offering products to consumers at extremely low prices in order to make quick sales, and this operation kills the profit margins of long-term legitimate retailers. Of course, legitimate retailers can ask manufacturers or product distributors to take action against these unauthorized sellers.
However, unauthorized sellers not only damage the interests of legitimate retailers, but also tarnish the reputation of the manufacturer of the product. Because some unauthorized sellers do not sell genuine products from brand manufacturers, but counterfeit versions of the manufacturer’s products. Counterfeit products are not as good as genuine products in terms of packaging or quality, and consumers are unaware of the situation, while brand manufacturers are inexplicably blamed. Over time, consumers lose confidence in buying brand products.
In addition, once a long-term price war between sellers begins, the manufacturer’s product prices will continue to fall, which further damages the brand’s image.
To prevent the situation from getting worse, manufacturers must solve these problems in a timely manner.
So how can manufacturers and brands fight against unauthorized sellers?
1. Register for Amazon Brand Registry
Registering for Amazon Brand Registry is the first and easiest step for brands to fight against unauthorized sellers. Through the Amazon Brand Registry program, brands can better control the sales of their brands on Amazon and get support from Amazon.
To register for Brand Registry, you must first have trademark patent rights. Click here to consult professional intellectual property experts. In addition to the most basic trademark registration, they can also provide you with more in-depth guidance on brand protection, brand extension, etc.
Of course, before you start tracking and reporting unauthorized sellers to Amazon, you must first lay a solid foundation so that Amazon can take action on your appeal.
2. Lay a solid foundation
Brand registration for Amazon Brand Registry does not mean that Amazon will listen to everything you report and take action. You need to provide Amazon with corresponding evidence to prove that the products sold by the sellers you reported are problematic.
To do this well, you need to “arm” your products in the following aspects:
(1) Customer benefits: When customers purchase your products from authorized retailers or distributors, they can obtain product quality assurance and warranty guarantees, enjoy your relevant return policies, and participate in your special promotions.
Providing these services to customers is not only beneficial to your customer service, but also can be used to test whether the sellers selling your products on Amazon are authorized. You can place an order on Amazon to purchase these sellers’ products. If the sellers cannot provide the corresponding services, you have evidence. You can directly and clearly tell Amazon that these products cannot be sold as “New” new products because they are sold by unauthorized sellers and the sellers cannot provide effective warranty services.
In this way, unauthorized sellers cannot list your products as “new” products to compete with your authorized sellers.
(2) Product quality control: Design special packaging for your products and sign storage and transportation requirements agreements with authorized sellers, informing sellers that if they do not comply with the relevant agreements, product quality cannot be guaranteed.
This is not easy for some sellers to achieve, because some legitimate sellers will send products to Amazon warehouses, and Amazon FBA will be responsible for product delivery, and they may undermine the agreement you signed with the seller.
For this requirement, you can monitor the sales of relevant sellers on Amazon on a daily basis to understand their situation. Although this method cannot help you find all problem sellers, it can at least screen out some of them.
Classify problem sellers
Once you have determined the list of legitimate sellers selling your products, you can cross them out of your tracking list and only keep those sellers you don’t know. For these sellers, you need to know the name, price, condition (new and old) and inventory of each product they sell.
Based on this information, you can usually divide them into two categories:
1. Individual sellers: sellers who only sell a few SKUs. Such sellers may not be professional sellers, but just reselling the gifts they received.
Of course, there is a very special category of sellers in this category – professional “retail arbitrage” sellers, who buy clearance goods from large retailers and then sell them on Amazon at the original price to make a profit. This is one of the most common complaints from legitimate sellers. To identify this type of seller, you need to understand their sales volume and track them for a period of time to determine whether they are short-term or long-term sellers. You can join some Facebook groups (usually including the keyword “FBA”) to keep up to date with the methods of “retail arbitrage” sellers.
2. Counterfeit sellers: These sellers are intentionally or unintentionally selling counterfeits of your brand products. These sellers may purchase counterfeit and shoddy products online or overseas, or they may think they are buying genuine products because they are first exposed to the relevant products. In any case, you must identify these sellers and take action quickly.
How do brands and manufacturers deal with problem sellers after identifying them?
Once you have identified a list of problem sellers, you can take the following actions:
1. Purchase test. Buy products from problem sellers and file an A to Z claim with Amazon immediately if there is a problem with their products. As long as you have laid a good foundation for your products, you can easily win the claim and prevent these sellers from listing such products again.
2. If you find that the products of the problem sellers infringe your intellectual property rights, you can submit a report to Amazon.
3. You can send a stop-sale email to the problem sellers, which may not be effective but is still worth a try.
Conclusion
For brands and manufacturers, to protect their brand reputation from unauthorized sellers on Amazon, you must establish a process to monitor the listings related to your brand products so that you can clearly understand who is selling your products, the price of the products, and how long the products are on sale.
After that, you can classify the relevant sellers and then take the right actions according to different seller categories.
In addition, for some big brands, Amazon allows them to strictly guard their own brand “gates”, which will prevent some illegal sellers from “getting involved” in big brand products, and further cause illegal sellers to turn their targets to small and medium-sized brands. In order to avoid brand infringement, small and medium-sized brand sellers and manufacturers should be more vigilant.