Gating your own brand
Hi folks. I have just been approved brand registration for a small product range that I have on behalf of the manufacturer. I approached them 3 years ago and was granted exclusive selling and control of their products on the Amazon platform.
I’ve again today been talking to Amz to try and ask them to gate my brand and I am getting nowhere.
So other than enhanced listings, Brand Registration is useless? Because the brand I am selling is freely available in the high street marketplace, there are literally thousands of sellers who can jump onto my listings. The owner of the products says that policing this is going to be impossible trying to get through to the sellers that there is an exclusivity agreement in place and I can totally see this.
In the last couple of months, the 3rd party sellers have created a race to the bottom, tanked the prices, greatly devalued the product and actually massively decreased sales as all our PPC campaigns have effectively been switched off as a result of hardly ever having the buy box.
On top of this, the high street shops that stock the products but don’t sell on Amz are horrified when they see the prices online even though the Amz sellers are now literally making pennies.
Brand registration, we thought, would bring back control but apparently not. If Amazon is not prepared to protect its sellers, what is the point of being on this platform. I feel like I am negotiating with the school bully. As I see it we have 2 choices. Continue trying to get brand gating or removing the products completely from Amazon. But that wouldn’t work even if it was possible to delete the listings, others would just recreate them. The owner of this brand is watching Amazon seriously damage his business and Amazon will do nothing. Does Amazon not realise that they have a huge problem here? I read yesterday about a business pulling 249 listings off Amazon exactly because of this reason.
Does anyone, please, have any ideas how we can get gated? I’m getting to the end of my rope here as is the owner of the brand. Thanks
30 replies
Seller_0pkMTMROIPEmY
Brand Registry is not a guarantee of exclusivity of sale on Amazon, it protects against authenticity, IP Rights and trademarks more than anything else and allows Brand owners to list products without requiring the use of EAN/GTIN bar codes. If you have trademark, design rights, IP rights or are an exclusive manufacturer of your own products Amazon will protect this and there are different levels of enhanced brand registry, but this is typically through direct agreement and sale rights with Amazon via Vendor Central. As an Amazon vendor not as a Market placed Seller.
They will not stop one of the fundamentals of selling on an open market place or police distribution agreements within a channel, they will request other Sellers listing against you to provide manufacturer or supplier invoices to prove what they are selling is authentic however if an infringement against them is made.
You cannot “Gate” a product through distribution rights alone, if your manufacturer is freely selling product via different channels to market as is typically the case, other sellers are legitimately able to sell that same authentic product on an open market place such as Amazon.
The issue is with the manufacturer and what agreement they want to have in place with Amazon that would be via a Vendor account
Seller_XrsxyuONn8r2w
Im surprised you got Brand registry based on the fact you are only technically a re-seller.
Seller_rChXk93s3cwtg
We are in exactly the same position and as I have learnt, the brand registry process offers little more than an ability to improve the quality of the content of your brand’s listings. We have many products that have multiple, poor quality, listings set up by sellers who have little or no interest in the listings and Amazon will not remove these or even merge them with the ‘official’ brand registered listing. It creates confusion for customers and degrades the value of the products and the brand. My only tactic is to always be the lowest price and to hope that over time sellers back away from my brands, leaving me with decent margins.
Seller_0pkMTMROIPEmY
The Brand Owner can decide to pull “their” products from Amazon or restrict their brand to a certain degree, they cannot however stop a legitimate reseller or distributor that has purchased genuine product from selling that product wherever they choose unless they have a specific legal or distribution agreement in place that states as such. This product is effectively your product you purchased legitimately from the manufacturer as does any other seller that has purchased the product legitmately, the fundamental of Amazon being open market place.
Seller_PY6qN1rPPfY0J
Legally I don’t think you can make dealers sign up to an agreement that prevents them from selling on Amazon because that would be a restriction of trade issue. The route I’ve taken over the years is to politely make it clear to my dealers that, if they add offers to Amazon marketplace, we simply won’t supply them anymore. That is something you CAN do and it has been very effective.
Seller_0pkMTMROIPEmY
Rapid Eyewear are correct and this is the normal way in which a manufacturer will restrict sales channels if sellers or distributors are abusing market positions , simply stop supplying them. There is EU regulation against anti competitive practices, but at the same time brands need to protect their brand and market it’s always a fine balance maintaining a healthy situaiton for all.
