Is Content Jacking the New Hijacking?


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Chris McCabe returns to talk about content jacking, moving on from listing hijacking.

  • How to deal with it, cope with it and defend from it
  • Somebody changed the image, bullets or brand name
  • Recently people have been calling Chris with people being locked out of their listing
  • You need to understand how to fight back

Competitors taking you out

  • Disruptive and take you our of the game
  • Changing the title, brand, bullets it affects you ranking
  • Some people think their listing is safe as they are brand registered, only one on there
  • Sometimes they will do it to grind you down
  • Some stories of competitors buying a bunch of your stock and returning them to get you black marked with Amazon
  • This is now next level stuff and getting deeper into the catalogue system
  • managing to convince Amazon they are the brand owner and not you

They take over your Brand

  • Brand registry would be your first point of contact
  • But remember it is a small team and they are not prepared for this peak in demand
  • You might have to cut a ticket and escalate with the brand registry team within a day!
  • Don’t give the abuser the time to be on your listing
  • Reporting the seller to Marketplace Abuse (MPA) Teams
  • Report it as listing violations
  • Bad faith changes to the catalogue are happening
  • Know how to report properly to MPA
  • You need to know the other channels to poke them to get action
  • Pursuing your trademark register and report them for violating your trademark and intellectual property

How is this Content Jacking being done?

  • People have been using the flat files and using vendor central or vendor express
  • Doing this to hundreds of listings and creating havoc
  • Possibly internal help is being used to make this happen
  • A really big problem for Amazon here
  • Band Registry 2.0 is meant to lock down any of the fields that other people could fill
  • Brand Gating is another method to look at here

How to fix it

  • I called seller support about this
  • I wrote to community help about this
  • These are the lowest levels of help here
  • To do more – Chris teaches them how to get quicker and real viable action from the Amazon teams
  • Catalogue team must be underwater currently and struggling to keep the lights on – they are under siege
  • Sellers have to stop going and posting your complaint publicly – toughen up and figure out how to get action taken
  • Sellers with their listing taken over now don’t know what’s going on – this is a super new attack vector
  • It might be happening to you If you notice your brand name has changed
  • Some might be more subtle that take 2-3 weeks to resolve the problem
  • In the meantime the competitor has gained rank and sales from you
  • Don’t use traditional methods to fix a non-traditional problem

Escalate it

  • If your title is changed to take the brand name out – you won’t know what’s happening
  • Seller Support have no idea and don’t know what to tell you
  • Try and get to the Catalogue team and hope you get someone good
  • You will change the listing back yourself to be able to fix it
  • Some sellers don’t have the right triggers in to be able to change their listing back
  • Is there any way that Amazon can lock down the listing?
  • Only by getting a friendly account manager on the inside to talk to the catalogue team and get it locked down for you from the inside
  • Catalogue team don’t understand intellectual property or trademark infringement
  • They are taking advantage of how ill in formed Amazon teams are

Amazon taking too long to respond

  • Chris is getting lots of calls about why Amazon is taking so long to respond
  • If it’s taken 7 days though, then maybe you should consider escalating the call
  • Some sellers have spammed them to hell and are now ‘final worded’ on their tickets
  • Queue levels fluctuate depending on how many people are working that hour
  • Depends what is happening – if a lot of suspensions have happened then Amazon teams might be super slow responding due to work load

Suspensions

  • What is the ratio between listing and account suspensions?
  • We all know about inauthentic versus account suspensions
  • Listing suspensions are omni-present
  • Account suspensions are different in terms of volumes happening
  • People weren’t meant to get a second chance on suspensions
  • However Amazon would have lost out on commission earning sellers if this rule had stayed rigid
  • If you’ve had multiple suspensions then you have to consider yourself to be in the last chance saloon

Product Review abuse

  • Product review abuse is on the rise too
  • Review aggregation is happening
  • The parent child separation problem is being aired
  • Hundreds of legitimate reviews being deleted
  • Competitors are attacking established sellers reviews and spreading false claims against legitimate suppliers
  • Seems like potentially internal people in Amazon are working against the system from the inside too

Contact Chris

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