Many businesses and manufacturers rely significantly on and even exclusively on Amazon.com to make their products available to consumers. To help manufacturers maintain control of their product listings and better protect their intellectual property, Amazon.com introduced a program called the Amazon Brand Registry. This program allows manufacturers to enroll their brand in the Amazon Brand Registry, registering themselves as the brand owner. This not only gives a certain level of regulatory power to the brand owner but also promotes consumer trust in the registered product.
What are the benefits of Brand Registry?
There are a number of benefits to a brand owner who has registered their trademarks in the Amazon Brand Registry.
- Reporting
The key feature of the Brand Registry is that it helps protect your registered trademark on Amazon.com. Brand Registry facilitates the removal of counterfeit or inauthentic product listings on Amazon.com because it has already been preemptively shown that the trademark is owned by you. If the inauthentic product is utilizing the Transparency by Amazon program, Amazon.com will additionally dispose of the inauthentic products.
Brand owners also have access to extra tools, such as enhanced text and image search, and predictive automation based on reporting of suspected intellectual property rights violations, to help with intellectual property protection.
- Prioritized Product Listing Editing
Amazon.com’s product listing information works by allowing sellers to edit the descriptions. Oftentimes, a seller may write incorrect information, and when a correction is made, the information does not update in a timely manner. Brand registry prioritizes the information from registered brands above all other sellers in the listing, which effectively gives the brand owner added control over their product listing titles, details, images, etc.
- Enhanced Brand Content
Registered brand owners have the ability to add enhanced brand content to their listings, which gives consumers a chance to view additional details about the product. The product conversion rate has been seen to have increased by as much as 30% from this enhanced content.
- Advertisement Approval
Ads for brand-registered products are approved by Amazon.com at an expedited rate. Amazon.com has approved ads for registered brands as quickly as 24 hours. Additionally, a brand owner can make adjustments to their advertisements and ad campaigns without pausing their campaign.
- UPC and EAN codes
Generally, Amazon.com requires a new product listing on their site to fall under certain product identification codes, specifically UPC and EAN codes. Owners of brands in the Amazon Brand registry may also provide other attribute codes or numbers.
What is eligible for the Amazon Brand Registry?
A brand that is eligible to join the Amazon Brand Registry must:
- Have a registered trademark
- Be a standard character mark; a typeset word(s)/letter(s)/number(s); an illustration drawing which includes words, letters, and/or numbers; or words, letters, or numbers in a stylized form
- Match the brand name printed on an existing product or its packaging
- Be an active trademark
- Be a trademark issued by the government patent and trademark offices in the United States, Canada, Mexico, India, Australia, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and/or the European Union
These requirements are put into place to reinforce the legitimacy of the registry, by denying any brands that are not suitable for intellectual property protection and enforcement.
How do I register my trademark with Amazon Brand Registry?
The steps to register your brand with Amazon are straightforward. First, you may only enroll your brand if you have a “text-based mark or an image-based mark with words, letters, or numbers” registered in the country you would like to enroll from. In the United States, it must be a text-based or image-based mark with a live registration filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Next, you must sign into the Amazon Brand Registry website using your existing Vendor or Seller Central credentials. This will connect your brand registry services with your vendor and seller services. If you do not have a current Vendor/Seller account, you can create a new one on the Amazon Brand Registry website.
To enroll your brand, you will need the following:
- The Brand name with a live registered trademark
- Trademark Registration or Serial Number
- Images of the Brand’s logo
- Images of products and packaging carrying the brand name
- A list of product categories in which the brand should be listed
- A list of countries where the products are manufactured and distributed
After you have submitted this information, an Amazon representative will contact you to verify your identity and trademark. Once the information has been reviewed and verified, you will have access to the Amazon Brand Registry services.
Wang IP Law Group, P.C. is a Los Angeles based full service legal firm that specializes in intellectual property law (patent, trademark, copyright, and licensing agreement), business and commercial litigation, and a wide range of other legal matters including immigration, real estate, and landlord/tenant cases. Our multilingual attorneys represent clients from all over California and internationally from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and Israel.
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