How to Protect Your Brand on Amazon

Amazon is a vast and ever-evolving marketplace where new opportunities emerge every single day. With more than 197 million consumers worldwide, Amazon is the largest eCommerce platform globally, allowing its 2.5 million third-party sellers to grow their brand. 

But, where there is an opportunity, there are also people looking to take advantage of other people’s hard work. 

In this blog, we look at the types of threats your brand faces and what you can do to best protect it. 

Types of attacks

1. List hijacking

In a nutshell, this is where someone sells a counterfeit or similar version of your product. Having your listing “hijacked” is a major concern among Amazon sellers, with 48% worrying about hijackers creating copycat listings.

A hijacked listing impacts both your customers and your bottom line. 

Suppose an unsuspecting customer purchases your product. But instead of receiving the original product from you, your Amazon hijacker gets the sale, and the customer gets an inferior, counterfeit version. Unhappy with their purchase because of the poor quality, the customer leaves a negative review on your listing. You get a bad review for something that you don’t even sell, discouraging future visitors from purchasing your product.

2. Trademark infringement

A trademark protects items that help define your brand, such as your name or logo.

Some sellers may use your business name or trademark to sell competing goods. This may involve recreating and selling something with a similar design or name, confusing customers into believing that they are purchasing your product when they are actually purchasing a knockoff. 

This can result in customer disloyalty and negative reviews for your products.

3. Fake reviews

Fake one-star reviews are an obvious way of sabotaging a competitor. Fake five-star reviews are also a significant problem. Wily black hat sellers use them to trick the algorithm into flagging a listing by flooding it with fake five-star reviews.

A tell-tale sign that a review is fake is if it comes from an unverified account.

The presence of fake reviews causes a loss of confidence, with 85% of consumers believing they read reviews that are “sometimes or often fake.” This can have a knock-on effect, with 28% of consumers saying a fake review would cause them to distrust other reviews.

These are three of the most common attacks sellers face on Amazon, and as you can see, they can negatively affect your brands. Fortunately, sellers can do a series of things to protect their brand on Amazon.

4 ways to protect your brand

1. Make your brand as unique as possible

The more unique your brand is, the more it will stick out when someone tries to copy you.

Here is how you can make your brand more unique:

• Hire an expert to design a logo for your brand - This is a vital element of the branding process and will help you stand out in a crowded marketplace. Then put your logo everywhere, including your listing, images, packaging, and the actual product. This prevents copycats from copying your work.
• Find market gaps to fill— Counterfeiting tends to be prevalent in an overcrowded market. That’s why you need to develop unique ideas that will address customers’ pain points. When your brand offers better value than what your competitors offer, it becomes difficult for shady sellers to copy.
• Explain what makes your product better than your competitors’ products - Along with highlighting the unique selling points of your product, be sure to expose the weaknesses of other brands to gain a competitive edge.

2. Catalogue your brand’s items on a separate site

This is an added security step to prove that you’re the rightful owner of your brand and products. 

The longer the digital paper trail, the more you can prove that you are the brains behind the idea.

3. Negotiate strong contracts with distributors

Your ideal option is to make yourself the sole purchaser of products, making it impossible for other sellers — and even the distributors themselves — to sell your brand on Amazon or anywhere else. You may have to enlist the help of a lawyer to make the contract binding. 

You can do many things to protect your brand, and these are just three of them.

However, perhaps the most important method of fending off any unscrupulous sellers is enrolling in the Amazon Brand Registry program. 

4. Register your brand

Amazon Brand Registry is a program that identifies brand owners to Amazon, giving them greater control and protection over their intellectual property and content.

Amazon states that enrolling into the registry gives brand owners “access to powerful tools to help protect your trademarks, including proprietary text and image search and predictive automation.”

Why register your brand on Amazon?

Registering your brand on Amazon gives you exclusive access to a host of tools to help promote and build your brand.

Here are our top 4 benefits of registering your brand on Amazon:

1. Protect your brand

Once your brand is registered with Amazon, only you can control how your content appears, preventing incorrect information from getting out and ensuring your customers only see accurate content about your brand and products. 

Registered sellers can also benefit from a dedicated internal team that can help monitor and protect your rights. For example, you can contact them to report any infringements and issues with listings.

2. Access enhanced content features

With Brand Registry, you will have a greater range of tools to promote your brand and products, including:

• A+ Content: With A+ content, you get room to add more text and images to your product listings. The ability to create visually rich content will do wonders for your conversion rates. 
• Amazon Brand Stores: Stores is like having your own website on Amazon. It’s a dedicated page that’s customised and structured to show off all your products together. 

3. Get to know your customers

With Amazon Brand Analytics, you can get a clearer idea about who your customers are and what they’re searching for. This gives you a great insight into where you should be focusing your products and marketing efforts.

With Amazon Brand Analytics, you will get access to:

• Amazon Search Terms: identify the most popular search terms, a term’s search frequency rank and which products are most clicked for each search term to help your keyword research.
• Market Basket Analysis: see what other products customers purchase when they buy your products. This will help you uncover cross-selling and bundle opportunities.
• Demographics: find out things like your customers’ age, gender and marital status to tailor your brand’s message to those buying your products.
• Repeat Customer Behaviour: keep track of your repeat purchases to make more informed decisions when driving repeat purchases and acquiring new customers.

4. Advertise with Sponsored Brand Ads

Registering your brand also unlocks Sponsored Brand Ads. These types of adverts help you attract customers when they’re at the searching stage. They appear in key locations across Amazon, like on the top of, alongside or within Amazon search results, to increase your chances of getting your brand and products seen.

What to do if your Amazon account has been compromised

If you believe that your Amazon account has been compromised, follow the steps below:

1. Change your Seller Central login password. If you are not able to log in to your account, contact Seller Support.

2. Review the following information in your account to determine whether any changes have been made:

   • Email address preferences
   • Payment information
   • User permissions
   • Amazon storefront details
   • Listing and condition notes
3. Your email account might have been compromised as well. Consider changing the email address associated with your account and using a different password for your email account.
4. If you receive emails or links that you suspect are phishing attempts, report them to stop-spoofing@amazon.com. For more information, refer to this help page.
5. Contact Seller Support to report that your account has been compromised.

Protect your brand on Amazon

You have gone to great lengths to create a consistent brand that customers know and trust. Then a third-party seller comes along and changes details about your brand or products.

We can help keep your Amazon account efficient and protected. Find out more about our account management services today.