How to Take Advantage of Hijackers with Dan Little – Session 023

Richard Morgan
November 8, 2017

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Living in Sweden Dan has been running Amazon Businesses for 4 yrs with 4 brands over that period, one of which he sold. He continues with the 3 brands, ten products and many variations and sizes. So he knows a little about how to take advantage of Hijackers on your Amazon products.

The Traditional Response to a Hijacker on your listing

Dan deals with the leaching Hijackers on your listing.
Traditionally you send them a cease and desist letter and hope they jump off
The other way is to buy their products, wait 30 days and then send Amazon a complaint of counterfit goods

Dan’s method is

Immediately send them a cease and desist letter
At the same time Dan buys all of their stock and does it through ‘search and buy’
So you’ll search for particular keywords that you want to rank for
Then buy a chunk of 10 or 15 units – buying more than one unit in a single order gives a higher conversion rate for that Listing (your listing in this hijacking case)
If you can buy 10 or 15 and buy them as a normal customer would, then it’s going to do nothing but benefit your search rank for that keyword
You’ll get a little bit of a bump from that
No risk to losing money on this order because you KNOW this person is selling counterfeit goods
Once you do report them to Amazon you will get your money back (30-40 days), you get the benefit of the ranking in that time and the hijacker has no stock left, so they can’t sell to your customers and you won’t get bad reviews for poor products

Dan stumbled onto How to take Advantage of Hijackers

Dan stumbled into this with his first one being a buy of £280, this was for a Hijacker who had 70 units of a product
He was lucky they had priced them really low – it was clearly a fake account and was across all the categories
Dan thought “happy days” and saw a way to strike back
And after 30 days and Dan got all his money back AND the improvement in the keywords he was ranking…
Dan spotted the system here and went for it
The latest one was $1,800 in the US – Dan’s still out of pocket but he’s sure he’ll get this money back in 20 days

When is this Strategy Risky

Dan’s not had any fail so far out of 5 to 6 Hijackers
There could be a potential small risk
If you don’t have a Trademark on your brand
You have a Hijacker who can ‘exactly’ copied your product (gone out the back door of your factory as Danny says) with same packaging, inserts, branding, the lot
In this scenario the Hijacker is not necessarily trading a counterfeit – he’s just trading your product exactly as you are
Without a brand trademark on your product Dan feels you make not want to risk it with this scenario

Cease and Desist approach

Dan finds the cease and desist letter work as long as they get through
He’s used it 5 times and they’ve emailed within 24hrs and apologised
Some of them have refunded the order straight away (but you’ve bought the stock already and got the keyword bump)
Some of them have taken the cease and desist, took the listing down but still had to go through the AtoZ complaint process
One of them was really ballsy and did not reply and Dan had to take him all the way through the AtoZ claim

Keyword Bump explained

First
- You do a search and buy – use the keyword andgo to the listing and buy the stock
- As long as there is no limitation on the listing to buy in bulk
Second part:
- The average order volume has a massive impact on the main keyword conversion through you buying a chunk of stock in the day you hopefully give a bump on your main keyword
So this is how we turn the Hijacking to our advantage that way

How to take Advantage of Hijackers – the A to Z Complaint process

Dan has had to take a few Hijackers through the AtoZ process
Once the estimated delviery time has passed
On the day after you can go to your personal account, orders and next to that oder there is a ‘file a dispute’ type link
You can file your dispute and the nfill out the form
This then goes to the seller who has 3 days to respond and give you a refund
If after 3 days you get no response you can ‘escalate’ this (but it doens’t remind you so you have to set a reminder to remember to do this)
If the Hijacker is not a hard-core Hijacker andwants to defend their account then they know that having an AtoZ claim is the absolute worst thing to have happen to your account and they won’t want lots of those, especially for big number orders to risk they will get suspended
But if they have fake tracking numbers it’s likely you’ll need to go right through the process

Can we speed this whole thing up?

Is there a way to speed this up by conversing with the Hijackers?
Not in Dan’s experience – they just don’t respond to anything and use a Turkey Post tracking number which are one of the ones that are easy to fake
You look at their storefronts and know they are fake, they have everything selling for $3.99 across multiple categories with thousands of products and they have no seller feedback – then you know it’s fake
And go back after a few weeks and see tons of 1 stars and their products are suspended because no-one is receiving anything
Danny has shot a video of the Hijacking scam to Seller Support and followed up with a phone call and this got products removed