Since the impact of follow-selling is very large, once the seller’s product encounters follow-selling, we must find ways to drive away follow-selling and reduce the impact on our products. This section introduces six methods to drive away follow-selling, hoping to be helpful to sellers.
1. Brand filing
If a product does not have a trademark, it will not be protected by the Amazon platform, which will leave opportunities for follow-selling. From a long-term perspective, if sellers want to operate stably for a long time and reduce the unstable factors in the later operation, it is best to register their own trademarks in the early stage of operation.
Trademarks are exclusive and regional. You must register a local trademark in the country where you sell on Amazon. For example, if you are doing a US site, you must register a US trademark, and if you are doing a Canadian site, you must register a Canadian trademark. In addition, trademarks have specific categories. When registering a trademark, you must choose the right category to prevent problems caused by the trademark being different from the category you sell in the future.
Like our domestic e-commerce platform, the carrier of the product is the store, while the carrier of Amazon products is the brand, so we must be particularly cautious in naming trademarks. First, we need to consider the characteristics of the product category, the culture of the country of sale, and the shopping habits of consumers in the country of sale. Second, we need to consider the readability and memorability of the trademark. It is best to make it easy for consumers to remember at a glance and easy to pronounce. This will be of great help in the later brand communication. After the trademark application is approved, the brand must be registered. Now Amazon TM and R marks can be registered. TM mark means that when you start registering a trademark, you will get a receipt within 7 working days. This receipt is the TM mark. Wait for 8 to 12 months. If there are no problems in the registration process, the R mark will be approved. The registered TM trademark has limited authority and incomplete brand protection functions. There are no functions such as “brand flagship store” and “infringement complaint”. Only some basic normal operations can be performed, such as GCID exemption and A+ page.
Brand registration can effectively curb the phenomenon of follow-selling. When follow-selling occurs, if it is an R mark registration, the follow-seller can be directly driven away through the Amazon backend. In addition, when registering a trademark, it is recommended that you choose a professional and reliable trademark service provider to register the trademark. Some sellers will choose to register by themselves or choose other sellers who have been registered with Amazon for brand authorization. If you are not familiar with the self-registration process, it is easy to cause trademark objections and be rejected due to various reasons, wasting a lot of energy and money. Therefore, it is recommended that you find a professional service provider to apply for a trademark. If the seller chooses to authorize other brands, it is very likely that when the other party’s brand expires, you will not be able to find the other party when you contact them again. It may even be that the seller’s store is blocked due to violations, resulting in the brand being implicated and your store is also blocked. When registering a trademark, sellers should understand the current national subsidy policy for mainland Chinese residents to apply for foreign brands. For example, applying for an overseas trademark in Shenzhen can get a trademark subsidy of up to 10,000 yuan. In other words, the money you paid for registering your trademark has been paid by the state. So what are seller friends waiting for? Don’t not register a trademark because of funding problems.