Looking through Seller Forums I noticed an alarming amount of Amazon Sellers (including myself) who are affected by those who falsely claim the design rights of a certain product and use that to have their competitors suspended on Amazon.

I am starting this thread with the hope that it will receive a high enough engagement to convince Amazon that measures are necessary to protect genuine sellers from fraudulent patent infringement reports.

My bestseller was suspended following one of these fraudulent patent reports by a competitor's agent. Amazon immediately suspended my product which resulted in a significant loss of revenue. Amazon then demanded that I negotiate with the competitor who made extortionate demands, and hence I decided to pursue the matter legally against the fraudulent design proprietor.

A funny story is that this product is a commonplace Chinese product that has been trading through the Amazon marketplace for over ten years, while the competitor only registered it a few months ago. Amazon made no checks regarding the authenticity of the claim before suspending my product.

If this wasn't enough, I asked Amazon support to extend the return date of the inventory affected, a very simple demand that they refused. Because of this, my business will sustain further damage due to the shipping and short-term storage of this inventory.

This is one of the most fundamental flaws within the FBA model and it has a massive impact on numerous Amazon Sellers.

Hello, I hope everything goes well with invalidating the fraud's design. I have followed the design invalidation process which has so far taken nearly 4 months. Hopefully, the process will be concluded sometime in August. Following that, I will take the tribunal's decision to report the bad actor to Amazon for damaging my business, I will see what kind of decision will be taken against them.

I think the issue has its roots in the UK's legal system. In my case, the bad actor is a Chinese national who does not have a physical presence in the UK. The bad actor registered a Limited Company through the UK Companies House online with a fake address and fake financial accounts. As for the address, I investigated courier databases like Royal Mail, which showed no presence of this bad actor in the address they claim.

Similar to your case, I found out that this bad actor registered hundreds of generic products through the UK IPO, using the Limited Company they registered online. What's ridiculous is that you can have any design registered in your name within a few days by the IPO, while invalidating it takes nearly half a year! The UK IPO carries no checks of originality, and will register any design in your name as long as you fill the form and pay the fee.

Since this bad actor is a Chinese national not a resident in the UK, I won't even be able to reach them to claim damages after my invalidation is successful.

I shared my concerns with the UK Companies House and the UK IPO, both decided to do nothing.

Amazon will only listen once I send over the tribunal's decision to invalidate. I am not sure whether Amazon will take measures to shut down the bad actor's Seller Account for intentionally damaging my business and undermining free competition within the marketplace.

P.s. I recommend you pursue the design invalidation process as this is the only way to have your listing reinstated by Amazon. Reaching out to media outlets sounds like an excellent idea since this issue is a big scandal. Perhaps Action Fraud could also be a good point of contact.

Feel free to share any information from my reply.

Wishing you all the best!

I want to ask what is the update of your case so far. I also have the same issue and working to resolve this, and want to see if you manage to invalidate the infringement so far

Hi,

I monitor A-Z claims regularly and take action when one appears.....BUT like today I seem to occasionally get a batch of cases decided against me appearing on a single day despite these cases never appearing on my AZ claims page.

I am well withing my limits for such cases but this is frustrating - would rather resolve issues with customers before a claim decision required.

Does anyone have any ideas about where these "ghost" claims come from?

Regards

The best thing is to start a signature campaign against this destructive team and organize all the sellers, we need to unite against this system that harms us by making personal decisions that harm so many businesses, we lose both money and products. There are people who order your products as Fraud, steal the parts, use the product and damage it,

A to Z is just a Fraud team, and it is really the biggest danger for all sellers.

I've started getting the error 'A value is required for the "list_price_with_tax" field.' when uploading my inventory file.

I use Abebook's Homebase export function to create a UIEE file to upload to Amazon and have been told I now need to include the new header for the 'list price with tax' field.

Does anyone know what that header is or how I could find out?

Help would be very much appreciated.

I'm hoping it doesn't come to that since it'd be much more labour intensive than uploading our existing inventory file.

Do you know if there's a way to download ones inventory from Amazon in Inventory Loader/template form? I might be able to deduce from that how to import or adapt my data if I were to see an example of all the required fields and already filled in.

For anyone else who has had this issue and wants to know - I created a photo of the 3 different types of earring backs, changed it to a white background using Fotofuze, the editor on my laptop allowed me to make the image square and it uploaded to the customisation section without me having to resize. I then put the surface 1 as the Earring Closure Style with a description of the different clasps and intructions to choose closure required. This worked on a test listing and so I was able to add the 3rd option to all of my listings by clicking EDIT on each one.

Hi All,

I'm on Handmade at Amazon and create costume jewellery, offering my earrings in pierced or clip ons so I had set up customisation on my listings so people could choose.

I now want to add a 3rd option for a different type of pierced closure, however the page has changed since I originally set it up. it is now asking for "surface 1", description and a square photo with specific dimensions.. I don't really understand what I'm supposed to do with this as I'm not printing T-Shirts and I don't have any square photos. Can I bypass this step?

It won't let me add my new option without uploading a photo!

Hi everyone,

I am a relatively new seller on Amazon and have had decent sales numbers. I have noticed to win the buy box, one of the biggest factors is how cheap your item is compared to competitors (baring in mind I am not selling an own label product). Whenever I had the cheapest price, I won the buy box. I wanted to ask about the longevity of this business as sometimes I have noticed that my competitors start cutting the price, then I also have to do it to make sales. How does one combat the price war and longevity of the business as everyone can start reducing prices? Thanks.