Brand Registry is a program Amazon designed to align with brand sellers who are also brand owners. There have been problems at Amazon over counterfeit products, or products coming directly from China that have a time span of two months. Those are complexities that you as a brand owner, seller, or vendor, have to deal with. However, Brand Registry gives brands an outlet to fight counterfeit products and also protects them from distributors that go rouge to sell on Amazon which will dilute your brand equity, decrease your pricing, so on and so forth.
Band Registry is a great tool to do the following:
1. Register your brand with your trademark and then own your content
For example, say you are a brand with a successful product on Amazon. It has 3000 reviews with 4.5 stars. So you and your distributors are doing exceptionally well. However, you’re always having an issue with the content. Brand Registry allows you to register your brand using that trademark. When you register on brand registry, it lets you know the application number on your trademark, and submits it to Amazon. Amazon then grabs that information and emails the attorney of record for your trademark saying “someone has requested brand registry from Amazon, this is the number we created in order for you to provide that to the brand owner so that the brand owner can confirm to us, that they are in fact the brand owner”.
It can be a challenge to make sure this registry process goes smoothly. First, you’ll need to contact your trademark attorney and let them know they are going to get an email from Amazon with a 16 digit number and it will say something about brand registry. Let the attorney know to send that back to you when they get it. Most attorneys understand that and will just send the email back to you and won’t charge you because you already did the trademark with them.
Secondly, once you get the email back from your attorney, you’ll need to that email back to Amazon with the 16 digit number (in some cases it may be letters and numbers or longer).
Finally, this will let Amazon confirm that you are the brand owner. Once you get that confirmation from Amazon that you are the brand owner, you can start doing a ton of different things to build your brand on Amazon. Like Enhanced Brand Content (which is the content you see on the BtF of that product listing), videos, subscribe and save, and vine. At this point, no one is going to be able to manipulate that content because you are the brand owner.
This whole process can be very complicated, time-consuming, and just downright frustrating. TrisBell can help with the whole process to ensure it goes well.
2. The other thing you’re going to be able to do is report violations
For example, let’s say your brand has a successful product on Amazon with 3000 reviews with 4.5 stars. However, there’s a rogue seller in there with counterfeit products. We’ve seen this a million times. They make these products in India or China, and you can buy them on Alibaba, and now they are cutting your price in half, diluting your brand equity, and providing products to your customers that are not legitimate. Now that you have brand registry, you can report them and any sellers that are not legitimate will get sanctioned and get kicked off the Amazon ecosystem.
Here are a few problems we’ve seen with Brand Registry:
Not submitting your brand registry properly.
For example, you create your brand store, and let's say the characters do not match your trademark. So like your name is in all caps but in the trademark, it's case sensitive. Whenever you create your brand store, if this doesn’t match your trademark, you may not be able to match that to the brand store.
The brand store is already taken by somebody else.
Even though you have the brand registry, you now have to fight with Amazon and that other seller to say “I own the trademark, you’re using it, I need you to remove that and change your brand store name in order for me to claim it.” In some cases, it's taken a week, in other cases a month.
You gave your trademark information to allow a third party to manipulate your listings (an agency like us or a distributor).
If you do this, they may have ownership of that brand registry and you are now locked out. We never allow Amazon to give us the right as an agency to maintain your trademark. You have to do that. If your agency is currently doing that fire them immediately.
