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As your e-commerce company grows, it’s likely that you’ll experience copycats. Despite the money and efforts you spent on marketing, customer relations, and manufacturing a high quality product, that work can be swept away when infringers disguise themselves under your company name and logo, stealing all your customers away. Even a seemingly innocent copycat can hurt your bottom line.
If you sell on Amazon, your company may be eligible to enlist in Amazon’s Brand Registry Program.
The Amazon Brand Registry is a program that enables vetted brand owners to register their brands with the platform and access Amazon’s infringement-finding artificial intelligence and enhanced reporting tools. Amazon maintains that enrolled brands report an average 99% reduction infringement activities since its launch in 2017.[1] Amazon also claims to have prevented 2.5 million bad actors from publishing false listings on its platform.[2] Now that’s a tool you could use!
Signing up for the Brand Registry Program is quick, easy, and useful — all it takes is an entry form and a registered trademark. Need to register your brand’s trademarks? Our team of Brand Registry Revelers at Rockridge® can help!
Benefits of the Brand Registry
Before we jump into the details of how you do it, let us tell you why you should.
Consistency and Accuracy
You may have a lot of product pages. And when details about your business and products change, it can be tremendously frustrating to edit that amount of information and go through those many product pages. The Amazon Brand Registry gives registrants more controls over their product pages so that you’re better enabled to associate your brand and products with correct information.
Gadgets and Gizmos
You don’t have to be a tech wizard (and we have one in-house, should you ever find the need for one) to access and utilize Amazon’s powerful search and reporting tools. Here are some cool features you can look forward to:
– A global search tool that enables you to look for pesky infringers without ever opening a second tab;
– An image search that can detect listings on Amazon that look similar to your logos and products; and
– An Amazon Standard Id Number (ASIN) search that allows you to check out and report infringing products fast.
But you don’t have to do all the heavy-lifting. Amazon will block suspicious activities, such as:
– Product listings that use your brand in its titles;
– Product images that contain your logo;
– Sellers shipping products from countries that do not manufacture or distribute your brand; and
– New product listings created under your brand name, when you have listed your full product catalog on Amazon.
Amazon’s AI makes it super easy to find copycats — and then report them. Amazon’s 24/7 team will review the report and then take action! Our clients have experienced an average 1 hour wait time between reporting and that reported page being taken down.[3] That’s fast!
More Amazon Features
Amazon Brand registrants can also access other cool perks to help them build and grow their business. Check out the Brand Dashboard, Enhanced Brand Content, Stores, and Sponsored Brands.
Qualifying for the Brand Registry
Step 1: Have a Registered (or Pending) Trademark
Trademark is legalese for the name or logo your business is using to sell products and gain consumer awareness.
While vendors do not currently have to pay anything to sign on to the Amazon Brand Registry, you may have to pay federal or attorneys’ fees to acquire a few trademarks. If you want to know more about the process of getting a federal trademark, check out this video: E-Commerce Law 101.
It takes around 6–9 months on average to get a registered trademark. If you’re in a rush, you can sign up for Amazon’s waitlist with your pending trademark serial number, and they may decide to let you in before your trademark is officially registered.
Step 2: Have the Right Kind of Trademark
Amazon’s Brand Registry program is limited to word marks and logos that have words or numbers in them. If you’re a trademark law guru, you’ll know that sounds, scents and video clips can also serve as trademarks, but Amazon won’t allow Chanel №5 to register its perfume scent on its registry. Sadly, if your logo is an image without letters, numbers, or words, you can’t register it with Amazon just yet.
Step 3: Be in the Right Place
Many countries have their own trademark registries. If you’re selling in the United States, you’ll want to seek brand protection through the USPTO. If you’re selling in the EU, look to the EUIPO. If you’re selling products in multiple countries, you must have registered trademarks in each place you want to enroll in through Amazon. Amazon only accepts trademarks that have been issued by certain countries (Australia, Brazil, Canada, European Union, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States).
You can check for list updates here.
Step 4. Mark the Product
This one is simple: make sure that your registered trademark is featured on your products’ packaging or the products themselves.
Step 5: Keep it Active
Registered trademarks can live forever, but they must be maintained. Each country has its own maintenance requirements, but in the U.S., trademark holders are required to pay a maintenance fee sometime between the fifth and sixth years after registration. After the initial maintenance filing and payment, the maintenance period extends to every ten years. Brand owners who allow their registered trademarks to become “dead” or “abandoned” can be rejected from the Amazon Brand Registry until those trademarks are reinstated.
Last Word
If you’re a brand owner that qualifies for the Brand Registry, I highly recommend that you sign up for it and utilize its tools. Amazon is giving you the opportunity to control your product listings, enforce your intellectual property rights, and access additional marketing tools.
Use it to your advantage, but don’t abuse the opportunity. Make sure any claims you submit are legitimate, or you may find your access to those tools revoked, or worse, your account suspended.
[1] https://brandservices.amazon.com/
[2] https://brandservices.amazon.com/
[3] Amazon investigates and takes action on more than 95% of all notices of potential infringement received from brands in Brand Registry within eight hours.
About RVL®
Rockridge Venture Law® is a certified B Corp law firm embracing the mantra of technology lawyers for good. Rockridge® services include corporate, intellectual property, litigation, M&A, privacy, technology, and venture capital law. Rockridge has been recognized as a B Corp Best for the World and Real Leaders Top 150 Impact Company, and has been featured by Conscious Company Magazine, Forbes, and other top media focused on industry leaders in impact and innovation.
The Rockridge team has worked with Grammy winners, Nobel Prize winners, and world champion athletes to create and monetize distinctive intellectual property assets. Rockridge clients include founders, investors, and multinationals scaling disruptive technologies and iconic brands. Rockridge is headquartered in Tennessee, with satellite offices in Durham, New Haven, and New York.
We’re Building Today’s Company for Tomorrow’s Economy® by leading clients through the dizzying array of information controls, by helping them to develop and monetize proprietary assets, and by enabling their impactful products, programs, and principles.
See case studies on how we’ve helped transformative companies at Rockridge Case Studies.
Please note that this guide is for informational and advertisement purposes only. The use of this guide does not constitute an attorney client relationship. As laws frequently change and may be interpreted differently, RVL® does not in any way guarantee the accuracy or applicability of this information.
