Brand Registry, Gating, Trademarking and Transparency

Richard Morgan
June 1, 2018

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James Thomson is with us on brand registry and was the first FBA Account Manager. Been involved with the Marketplace for 11 years and runs the Prosper show in Las Vegas annually.

Brand Registry

Amazon offers a few tools for brands to be authoritative
The Brand Registry is the tool used to demonstrate registered brands are the authentic owner of the brand
Amazon may not deem you a ‘real brand’
You must also resubmit all your content to secure your status
You have to be very logical and disciplined about how content is submitted and locked down after being approved for brand registry
Open fields with no data means that someone can come along and submit content in those fields
You can use brand registry to defend your product

Brand Registry to Lock Down content

Brand Registry is a content tool for locking down content
Not a tool for getting people off your brand and listing

Fill out all the Fields

There are 40 fields of data for your SKU
Your job as a brand registry owner is to fill out all of those fields – if you leave any empty someone else ‘could’ come and fill those in

Brand Gating versus Brand Registry

A distribution control effort
Very few brands get ‘gated’ and it only lasts for 12 months then Amazon turns it off
There are different levels of gating and for Amazon most gating means no ‘additional’ Sellers can create an offer on the listing
Any Sellers already there can continue, it’s not a method of kicking people off your listing

Amazon wants

Stifling competition is caused by gating
Amazon’s aim is to be the cheapest destination for the product
When you start gating you need a really good reason for doing it
Reasons for gating:
- A long history of counterfeit sellers on the product (as in many months)
- Put in or on your body – could cause long term harm to the customer if a counterfeit product is sold

Brand Gating a waste of time?

Amazon almost never awards gating for brands
When they do it’s not a tool for managing distribution control
Prefer to:
- Get a design patent on my product to give me legal protection on my product – Amazon very happy to enforce design patents with counterfeit sellers of your product
- Put an on-line reseller policy that includes language about anti-diverting to other sellers built around the status of your trademark
It’s a higher effort on behalf of the brand to protect itself
Control distribution to ensure others don’t get access to it to sell it
Put enough roadblocks in place and a trademark legal position that will deter illegal sellers

Trademarking

Have to have a trademark for Brand Registry 2.0
You can have a UK trademark and sell in USA using that Trademark
Why are you selling a ‘brand’ anyway – if you’ve just got a generic product in your own packaging then you don’t have a brand
You need to think of it as an asset that you’re building longterm – not just ticking a checkbox for Amazon
If there’s no long term intent to build up that brand then why
Worked with brands that have got big enough to be bought out by venture capitalists
If you are looking to sell the brand then use a lawyer to set it up the right way for selling it on

Beware of Abusing Brand Registry

James warns against Sellers abusing their brand registry seller support to get sellers off their listings time after time
Amazon frowns on this use of the brand registry and has been known to remove a sellers brand registry if it is abused to control distribution

Patents on Products

Amazon has a history of enforcing design patents
In the USA a design patent protects you for 14 years but cost thousands of dollars
Amazon will help protect your product if you can demonstrate your design patent is being violated

Amazon Transparency Programme

Help brands further control
Rolled out in test form in 2017 and rolling out further
Recognise you may have had some problems to counterfeit products being sold on Amazon
You can buy custom codes that get applied to the products – buy batches of a 1,000
Separate to the UPC and when Amazon receives the products into Amazon then when it receives the same product coming in from another seller then it will be rejected without this transparency code
If it goes merchant fulfilled then Amazon won’t see the product to see the code
Amazon continues to try and keep up with the nasty sellers out there