Your business is your brand and to make your business big Amazon Brand Protection is very important. Thriving in the online marketplace is not always a smooth-sailing ride. Granted that the online aspect of online selling gives you quite the benefits. Think about not needing to worry about having to pay rent for a commercial space, not needing to have office space or paying employees to perform store functions.
It definitely sounds like the entrepreneur’s dream, particularly in marketing your product. Never has it been as easy to put the word out for your brand, granted that you have enough cash to pay for it. If you have a good enough product, word will flow along the interwebs as naturally as a viral video. However, with much product visibility does come with a price. You become a potential victim of counterfeiters and unauthorized sellers.
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The Amazon platform for online selling has become a fixture to modern life. Aided by the internet whose speeds increased by multiple folds throughout the last decade, and the world wide access ever-expanding, the domination of the online marketplace seems inevitable.
Part of the reason why it grew so much is because of the third-party sellers that they recruit. If you are reading this article, then you might be one of them or planning to join their ranks. And if there is one thing that concerns every online seller in the platform, it would probably be Amazon Brand Protection.
In this article, we are going to talk about ways for sellers to protect their brand on the Amazon platform.
Amazon Brand Protection Policing Counterfeits
A problem that most online sellers face today even outside the Amazon platform is the so-called counterfeits. Counterfeiting existed long before the online market, and possibly as soon as the man decided that trading is a thing. A counterfeit is an illicit product meant to deceive a buying customer.
The counterfeiter’s objective is to sell their own products and pass it on as if it was an original. This becomes a problem for both the buyer and the original seller. For the buyer, they are most likely going to get a product that is subpar from the original.
This makes sense because the counterfeit trader does not feel the need to maintain the brand’s reputation. Their intent is to just make as much profit as possible without regard for whom the brand is owned by.
What makes counterfeiting particularly nasty on online platforms is that they can swoop in fast and from all over the world. While the internet has made it possible to connect all parts of the world, which is a beautiful thing, it also made it easier to perform illicit acts.
Online counterfeit traders use online platforms like Amazon to scout for products they are likely to copy. From here on out, the challenge is to make the product look as close to the copied product as possible.
With improvements in technology, reverse engineering even the most complex contraptions become possible. They will then sell the products on sites online, including the platform from which they found the product.
Policing this behaviour may seem impossible at first given the guise of anonymity that illicit traders use to their advantage. Most sellers hide behind proxy IP addresses to hide their exact physical address. And even if they are identified, some of them live in places which makes law enforcement problematic.
Amazon Brand Protection from Different Types of Counterfeiters
The Amazon Platform introduced two ways to combat counterfeiters and those are the Brand Registry and Project Zero. Both of these measures are available only to the brand owners recognized by the platform itself.
This means that you can only protect yourself on the platform against illicit activities done on the platform. However, given that Amazon accounts for almost half of the world’s online buy and sell transactions, protecting yourself on this platform can affect you significantly.
There are a lot of different kinds of counterfeit traders. Some will sell legitimate products albeit without the permission of the supplier. They are not counterfeiters in the vague sense and are more commonly called unauthorized sellers.
While they do not pose a problem for consumers, they can make sellers lose trust in their suppliers. Suppliers put a levy on their authorized sellers which translates to increased markups for customers. If a supplier has an unfair advantage of not needing to pay the levy, then the other suppliers will lose business.
Like most online markets, Amazon lets sellers show pictures of their products to customers. Unfortunately, there are no means for customers to know if these pictures are genuine. Counterfeiters take advantage of this vulnerability to fool customers.
By simply putting up pictures of the product and labelling them as such, they can sell counterfeit products as if they were original. And since customers will not be able to inspect them, on the spot, there is a chance for customers to be fooled by the scheme as well.
Amazon Brand Protection Through Reviews
The best way to make sure that your product has a healthy reputation is to monitor reviews of your product. Product reviews have been around for a while, and for better or for worse, it has become a significant factor for how businesses market their brands.
There are a few aspects included in managing the reviews of your products. On one hand, you have to be aware that your competitors may spam your products with fake reviews. These are inevitable as product anonymity once again comes into play.
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There are also ways for you to take advantage of product reviews overall, including the negative ones. And this is to monitor the dilution of your product. Studies show that dissatisfied customers are more likely to post negative reviews than satisfied customers are to post positive reviews.
The psychology behind it is that customers feel like they are getting revenge for the poor service if the product does not meet their expectations. Whereas satisfied customers think they are just getting the product that they have paid for.