Why you & only you should control your brand on Amazon

First, if you’re a brand that has distributors selling your products on Amazon you might find that distributors often sell lots of different products from different suppliers, so ensuring a brand’s assets are correct may not be at the forefront of their strategy.

Second, if you don’t have distributors, it makes sense to ensure that your brand is effectively portrayed on Amazon. Your brand identity is sacred, it’s how customers recognise your brand and the products that are being sold.

It can also evoke a sense of trust amongst customers too, if your brand looks a little different than normal, customers may not want to buy.

Here are some advantages of controlling your brand on Amazon:

1. Drive consistent brand messaging
2. Ensure accurate product representation
3. Seamless customer experiences

Moroccanoil are a great example of why you should want to control your brand on Amazon. They relaunched their Amazon store in March 2019, after years of distributors representing the brand on their behalf. They had encountered several issues with distributors selling their products and realised that their brand wasn’t being represented properly on the platform and therefore didn’t inspire their customers’ trust.

By taking control of how their brand is represented, Moroccanoil were able to ensure their consumers have a great shopping experience buying genuine Moroccanoil products they know and love.

They’ve even included a message to customers on their brand store to this effect:

Common Issues with lack of brand control on Amazon

We could record a podcast on this, but here’s a shortened list instead.

1. Duplicated listings

Often there are multiple ASINs listed, that are actually the same product. Each of these listing will tell a different story to the customer but the brand is losing the benefit of the combined sales on a single listing and the resulting impact on their sales rank.

If your sales of Product A are split between two or three listings, the sales of each listing will be lower than the sum of the combined. That means your product will be appearing lower in search results.

2. Products listed under multiple “brand names”

Often distributors will list your product under a different brand name. This is confusing to the customer and also creates an element of distrust “is this the correct brand, or is this a counterfeit product?”

It also means that the discovery of your products on Amazon is a lot more challenging for the customer – when they click on the incorrect brand name, they won’t be able to see your full catalogue. Or even worse, you’ll have products that aren’t your brand appearing next to yours!

3. Mismatched bundles

Distributors will often bundle your product: maybe a 3-pack for a discounted price, or a mix-tape of complementary products bundled together. Don’t get us wrong, it’s often a good idea to create bundles of your product but to do it well, you need to have consistency across similar products. If a customer can buy a 3-pack, 6-pack and 12-pack of Product A, but only a 2-pack or 24-pack of Product B it’s going to negatively impact their experience.

4. Inconsistent, incorrect & out of date content

To ensure your brand is being showcased on the platform effectively, you need to be sure that you have consistency across your listings. A great listing inspires consumer confidence, educates & tells the brand story effectively and guides the customer to purchase. That means your brand should have the same look & feel in your listing images, titles, bullet points, and within the A+ Content. What’s more, incorrect information also leads to negative reviews which can easily be avoided.

5. No brand store

If a brand isn’t taking control of its presence on Amazon, customers will be guided to Amazon’s pre-made storefront, based on the products listed under the brand name. This will be the Amazon template and will not have all the recognizable brand assets that customers have come to know and trust.

You may be interested in: What’s Amazon Brand Store?

Strategies for Taking Control of Your Brand on Amazon

1. Sign up for the Amazon Brand Registry

In 2022, 99% of product listings blocked or removed from the Amazon store were found by Brand Registry’s proactive controls.

This is the best and easiest way to control your brand on Amazon. We’ve written extensively about the benefits of the Amazon Brand Registry and the newly released brand registry impact dashboard which are key resources to help you with this topic.

Let’s quickly break down what the Brand Registry is:

It’s Amazon’s tool that gives big or small sellers complete control over their listings and eliminates brand hijacking.

It allows private label sellers, vendors, and other rights owners to keep an eye on their brand, IP, and infringement issues.

The dashboard provides an overview of your active Amazon proactive protections for your registered brands. This includes:

• Number of brands registered and protected
• Number of infringing ASINs removed
• Number of invalid new ASIS or invalid modifications of existing ASINs prevented
• View trends and filter the protection data by store, brand or category.

Here’s how to join the Amazon Brand Registry:

1. Sign in to the Amazon Brand Registry
2. Begin the process of enrolling your brand. You will need –

• Your brand name that has an active registered or pending trademark.
• The trademark registration number which is provided by the Intellectual Property office.
• A list of product categories (e.g. clothing, sporting goods, electronics) in which your brand should be listed.

3. Submit the information and wait for Amazon to verify you.

2. Build an Authoritative Amazon Storefront

You wouldn’t allow a third party to create and manage your website, would you? So why let Amazon manage your brand store?

Brand stores are a multi-page store on Amazon that allows you to showcase your products and brand in an immersive way.

They are a brilliant way to educate the customer and tell your brand story, especially when customers are in the awareness and consideration phase of their journey to purchase. If you have the opportunity to show off what makes your brand special, you should leverage that!

It’s basically a mini-website! You’ll want to –

1. Customise your Amazon storefront – Create a template, ensure all your brand assets are added like logos, company name and taglines.

2. Showcase your brand values and story – Go a step further to ensure your brand story is told through the correct images and videos. You can add extra content through A+ content.

3. Leverage enhanced content for a cohesive brand message with A+ content

You can really make your brand pop further with A+ Content.

A+ Content creates an enhanced brand experience by elevating your Storefront and product listings with content like video, rich text, extra product modules and testimonials to drive conversions and increase traffic and sales.

They give an opportunity to add extra information that can help tell your brand story or give a more in-depth look at your products. You can also align your brand storefront with other marketing channels you may have to keep brand consistency.

There are three types of A+ Content that you can use to elevate your brand on

• Basic A+ Content: This means you can elevate your product descriptions and highlight key features with images, customised text placements, and shoppable product comparison charts. These help to encourage conversions and increase sales.

• Premium A+ Content: This level offers more engaging and informative product listings with the ability to add larger images, videos, interactive hotspots that customers can hone in on product features to gain more information about the product, clickable image or video carousels, question and answer (Q&A) modules, and shoppable product-comparison charts.

• Brand Story: We recommend also adding your brand story as it helps to highlight your brand identity on Amazon. This basically allows you to share your brand’s story, values, and mission across all your product listings. It’s located under “From the brand,” your story can also help drive traffic to your brand by offering links to your Amazon Brand Store and other products in your catalogue.

4. Monitor and enforce brand guidelines and brand protection

This will be an important step to ensure your brand is correctly represented amongst your distributors, and be able to catch any counterfeiters.

1. Monitoring and enforcing brand guidelines

If you are signed up for Brand Registry, you will receive proactive protections from this programme like “Automated protections”.

Automated protections stops bad listings before they get published when you provide data about your brand and products and intellectual pro[erty rights, it will proactively stop bad listings being published through machine learning.

Another feature of brand registry is the ability to report a violation through the dashboard. You are able to search their catalogue easily to look for violations of trademark, copyright, patent and design violations and report them.

If you have identified resellers that do not comply with your guidelines, you will want to have a plan in place for how to respond. We recommend always sending a set of Brand Guidelines to your distributors that details how your logo should be used, taglines, product descriptions and any do’s and dont’s for example bundles.

This will help to avoid any mistakes, but monitoring them regulary to check will still be required.

2. Combatting counterfeiters and unauthorised sellers

Counterfeiting is a big issue for brands. You may think this pertains to the luxury goods industry only but this happens on Amazon everyday, they have a task force dedicated to combating this – the Counterfeit Crimes Unit (CCU).

In 2023, Amazon invested more than $1.2 billion and employed more than 15,000 people—including machine learning scientists, software developers, and expert investigators—dedicated to protecting customers, brands, sellers, and the platform from counterfeit, fraud, and other forms of abuse.

Also in 2023, 7 million counterfeit products were identified, seized, and appropriately disposed of worldwide, preventing them from harming customers or being resold elsewhere in the retail supply chain.

Aside from Brand Registry, Amazon offers three other brand protection programmes you can enrol in:

1. Transparency

It’s a tool to protect your brand and customers by ensuring every product that is shipped is authentic.

Transparency uses secure, unique codes that identify individual units, stop counterfeits from reaching customers, improve customer engagement, and give brands valuable insights to help optimise supply chains. You can learn more about Amazon’s Transparency here.

2. Project Zero

This deals with the counterfeiting of products, and the programme is designed to give you the ability to remove counterfeit items without the need to contact Amazon. Learn more about Amazon’s Project Zero here.

3. Counterfeit Crimes Unit (CCU)

This is where you can work with Amazon’s global team to build a case against counterfeiters and bring them to justice. Learn more about Amazon Counterfeit Crimes Unit here.

Our Thoughts

It’s so, so, important to have control over your brand on Amazon. First, because you spend so much time and effort creating a brand that resonates across all platforms, it should be reflected on Amazon also. Second, for all the reasons mentioned above – customer trust and recognizing your brand, brand identity being consistent and stopping bad actors and counterfeit products being sold in your name.

Using the tools available on Brand Registry and the other enrolment programmes will help you stay on top of all the distributors selling your products without the proper brand use.

Struggling to get a handle on protecting your brand on Amazon? We can help! Our team of Amazon experts have worked with many brands on the subject and is happy to answer any questions you might have on this because we get that it can be a bit overwhelming sometimes to get your head around everything! Just Send us a message or book a call.