Reducing counterfeit sales online, specifically on Amazon.com. Free consultations 7 days a week: 1-877-9-SELLER.
Rosenbaum Famularo, PC – Brand Protection Done Right
Either the brand itself or one authorized seller should get brand registry. What brand registry gives you is control over the listing or the description of your product on Amazon. Incredible tools to help you protect your brand both from counterfeits and also from unauthorized sellers. Number three, it gives you incredibly efficient ways to contact people/companies selling counterfeit products. It gives you a much stronger position in terms of making counterfeit complaints for the sellers who don’t amicably stop selling counterfeits once they receive your cease and desist communication.
To monitor your business, we use an incredible software solution that monitors every product that we are watching.
It’s not just a friend but the individual product or the individual listing for many Amazon sellers will do what’s called bundling and take your product and put it with another product and then create another listing. You need to use software to give you at least daily reports as to who is selling your product on Amazon to help identify who is selling counterfeit products on Amazon. If you write a cease and desist communication effectively, you will let that Amazon seller know that if they don’t stop selling counterfeit versions of your products, their entire business is at stake. Most often, they will stop selling. We experience a 60-80% amicable resolution rate when it comes to sellers who received the C&D communications that we send because we know what to write. We know how sellers think. We know how they react.
Amazon comes in waves in terms of requiring test buys before you can assert a complaint.
In order to do test buys in an efficient manner, you need to have the infrastructure in place. You need to be able to organize the ordering of the product, the receipt of the product, receiving the emails confirming delivery, and then using specific tracking numbers to then assert your complaint on Amazon. If you don’t have a system in place in advance, the test buys can be absolutely overwhelming. You can literally have dozens or thousands of test buy products arrive at your doorstep and you must have the infrastructure system in place.
You must only assert valid counterfeit complaints.
If you’re a brand manager, if you’re engaged in brand protection and the products are not counterfeit, don’t assert a counterfeit complaint. What you’re doing is you’re shooting your own brand right in the foot. When you exert a false counterfeit complaint, you are now giving that unauthorized seller leverage over you and leverage over your brand. You have opened up the brand to civil liability. You have opened the brand up to complaints against it on Amazon.
Last but not least, you may not know this …
One of the most significant risks that brands have from counterfeit goods being sold on Amazon is Amazon itself.
It doesn’t matter whether you have a tier 1 brand manager at Amazon. It doesn’t matter if you’re paying a quarter million dollars a year to Amazon to help you protect your brand. We have inside information that Amazon will go around your tier 1 brand manager within the company, within Amazon’s own staff, and reach out to what Amazon calls Amazon vendors. They will ask those vendors to get Amazon inventory of your branded product. Amazon will knowingly buy and then resell counterfeit products.
We have one case where Amazon literally had over a hundred and sixty consumer complaints that the products that Amazon was buying from its vendors and then reselling on Amazon were counterfeit and they kept selling the products. Not only did Amazon keep selling counterfeit products, but they went back to that Amazon vendor and asked that Amazon vendor to open up multiple accounts so that Amazon could continue to buy products from it to sell not just in the US, but also in the UK, and also then in Australia.
Amazon needs to be watched like any other seller if you want to protect your brand from counterfeit sales on Amazon.
If you’d like to learn more about our team can protect your brand from counterfeit sales specifically on Amazon, contact us.
