Amazon is setting the bar high on its mission to become the “Earth’s most customer-centric company”.

If consumer research is anything to go by, it’s well on its way to achieving its goal too. In 2019, the Harris Poll ranked Amazon as the #2 most reputable visible brand in the US, beaten only by America’s supermarket giant, Wegmans.

In the drive to prove itself as a brand consumers can trust, Amazon launched its Brand Registry service. Registered brands can authenticate their products and identify potential infringements, protecting consumers from unknowingly purchasing counterfeit goods.

Big names such as Procter & Gamble, Casio and GoPro are on board and are reporting greater protection for themselves and their consumers and “lightning fast” response times from Amazon.

How Does the Brand Registry Work?

The Amazon Brand Registry is a system that allows companies to protect their intellectual property by monitoring Amazon for suspected counterfeit goods listings.

Once a company has passed the enrolment process, it can access various functions to help identify fraudulent sellers. If a suspect seller is discovered, the brand representative submits a report to Amazon. This sparks an investigation followed by appropriate action.

The powerful search function offers both image- and text-based search options so you can search for your company logo or trademark images as well as name. A company can also search for the product detail pages that relate to its brand products to ensure that all listings contain accurate and representative content.

As well as proactive efforts to identify infringements, Amazon Brand Registry also runs additional automated protections to intelligently search for and prevent counterfeit listings. The software recognises when a logo, image or trademark sign is used on a product listing that doesn’t belong to that brand.

The Brand Registry service is proving very successful, with over 130,000 brands registered from around the world. Amazon reports that as a result of the initiative, 99% of results pages served to customers have no infringement notifications.

Transparency

Alongside the Brand Registry, Amazon has also launched Transparency, a service designed to enable the authentication of individual products. Participating brands attach an identifying code to every individual product which is then scanned by Amazon fulfilment before delivery to verify that the item is a genuine product before it reaches the customer.

Also available as a downloadable app, Transparency allows customers themselves to authenticate branded products when purchased from Amazon or any other retailers. As well as reassurance that they are purchasing a genuine product, consumers will be given information such as manufacturing date, manufacturing location and product ingredients. By directly serving the consumer and working to combat counterfeit sales, Amazon is increasing the credibility of both its own brand and others.

How Can Brand Registry Work for Your Business?

In a nutshell, the Amazon Brand Registry gives you more control over your brand and how it appears on Amazon. It ranks your authentic listings above any third-party sellers and allows you to monitor and correct any inaccurate or misleading descriptions that appear when someone searches for your brand or product.

Having the weight of Amazon behind you means that protecting your trademarks and preventing copyright infringement becomes a great deal easier. Rather than spend time manually searching Amazon for products that match yours, you will have access to software designed specially to perform this task quickly and thoroughly, as well as automated systems working around the clock.

As a by-product of clamping down on counterfeit sales, you might have the unexpected bonus of achieving higher customer satisfaction ratings. Customers who are disappointed in the poor quality of a counterfeit product that they bought, believing it to be genuine, will often leave negative reviews aimed at the brand itself. As the Brand Registry removes fraudulent sellers from the Amazon platform, you can maintain high standards and protect the reputation of your brand.

Although based in the US, Amazon’s Brand Registry service also covers most of the world’s leading economic countries. It is vigilant with monitoring its UK arm and is a member of a Memorandum of Understanding with various organisations throughout Europe to share information to prevent the sale of counterfeit goods here.

Amazon offers a global support service that runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week to answer questions or deal with problems. Round-the-clock support is also available for reporting potential infringements and it’s reported that 95% of claims are dealt with within eight hours.

How Do I Enrol?

You must be able to satisfy particular criteria before you can enrol on the Brand Registry. Amazon requests that you have a brand name that is an active, registered trademark and that you can provide the trademark number(s) issued by the relevant government(s) for the countries in which you wish to trade.

You will also be asked for a list of the categories that your products fit in to and the names of the countries in which your products are manufactured and sold. You must already be registered with Amazon as a Seller or Vendor to be able to join the Brand Registry.

To take part in the Transparency scheme, you must have the capacity to apply identification codes to all your products.

Final Thoughts

Amazon really has excelled with this service that seems to tick all the boxes in helping both consumers and brands. And the best part of the Brand Registry? It won’t cost you a penny. Amazon offers this whole service for free in a bid to boost credibility and customer satisfaction across the board.

As an additional benefit, when you successfully register with the Brand Registry, you also qualify for Amazon Sponsored Brands. This allows you to display banner-style ads that showcase your logo, text and selected products across the top of search results pages. You do have to pay for this service, but you can adjust your bid to suit your ads budget, so it’s definitely worth considering as part of a wider marketing plan.

If you’d like to find out more about how Amazon can work for your business, why not get in touch at h[email protected].