Much time, effort, and passion go into building an e-commerce business, including producing creative collateral such as product images, logos, and other intellectual property (IP). In the ultra-competitive e-commerce space, every product listing detail needs astute attention to stand out. This is why successful e-commerce businesses promote their products with high-quality media and well-written copy. It goes without saying that launching and scaling a successful e-commerce business takes a commitment to hard work and financial investment.
Unfortunately, nefarious actors aren’t willing to put in the effort running a legitimate e-commerce business requires. As reported by WIRED, for example, a seller on Amazon discovered that they were being undercut by a competitor who had created exact duplicates of their listings on Temu, the U.S. version of Chinese e-commerce marketplace Pinduoduo. This case is not unique, as it is becoming increasingly common for fraudsters to create exact duplicates of successful Amazon listings for use on other platforms.
With so many threats facing the IP of e-commerce businesses, brand protection has become a vital element to success. As the world’s leading e-commerce marketplace, Amazon has dramatically tried to protect legitimate sellers on its platform. Amazon offers five programs: Transparency, Project Zero, Counterfeit Crimes Unit, and IP Accelerator. Each program provides a different set of features to help protect brands from counterfeiting and other threats. Here, we’ll look closer at the Brand Registry, which allows sellers to manage their listings and secure their IP.
What is the Amazon Brand Registry?
A pillar of Amazon’s suite of brand protection tools, the Amazon Brand Registry provides sellers with a defence against the misuse of logos, images, video, and written content. While it’s not mandatory for Amazon sellers and vendors to enroll in the program, listing a brand with the Brand Registry provides access to a range of automated tools to guard against IP infringement and other damaging activities. Access to the Brand Registry is free and even open to sellers outside the Amazon marketplace.
Why should sellers and vendors enroll?
The Amazon Brand Registry was developed in direct response to the unprecedented rise of IP theft in the e-commerce space. As reported by the Associated Press, IP theft costs the U.S. economy more than $600-billion annually. The Brand Registry is used by Amazon to verify brand owners while equipping them with the tools they need to protect themselves from “bad listings”. The registry performs automated scans of billions of daily listing update attempts to identify potential abuse. The registry also provides a reporting mechanism, which sellers can use to find suspected IP infringement and report these infractions to Amazon for further investigation. According to Amazon, the registry scans more than 8 billion attempted changes to product detail pages to flag possible IP infringements.
In addition to protecting from IP infringement, the Brand Registry also gives access to e-commerce growth tools such as A+ Content – previously known as enhanced brand content (EBC) – to help sellers optimise their product listings with engaging media.
How do I register with the Brand Registry?
The process for registering with the Amazon Brand Registry is simple. Brands with a pending or registered and active text-based or image-based trademark can create an account.
From there, they must prove they are a legitimate entity associated with the product being registered (such as trademark registration records or other legal documentation).
Once completed, the registration is approved within a few days and brand owners can monitor the web for any activities that could be perceived as an infringement on their IP rights, such as counterfeit sales or unauthorised use of their logo or images associated with their product line.
More detailed instructions to enrol on Amazon Brand Registry are on our previous blog, Guide to Trademark Protection on Amazon.
The Bottom Line
From creative elements produced by generative AI to sophisticated web scraping bots, the technological boom over the past decade has equipped entrepreneurs in the e-commerce space with many tools to build and scale their businesses. Whether a seller builds their portfolio of products or flips products as a third-party (3P seller), the digital space has opened a whole new world of economic opportunity. However, with the rapid advancement of e-commerce and technology comes increased threats, particularly regarding IP.
While Amazon’s brand protection tools, such as the Brand Registry, serve as a solid foundation to protect legitimate e-commerce businesses, more must be done to keep up with increasingly savvy bad actors equipped with the latest technology. What’s needed to succeed as an e-commerce brand is online brand protection software such as GreyScout, which integrates with Amazon’s brand registry.
GreyScout online brand protection platform easily monitors online marketplaces to detect grey market and illegal activity as it happens to stay one step ahead of those looking to damage your brand reputation.
