How to Register A Trademark with Amazon Brand Registry

Understanding Amazon Brand Registry

We receive a lot of emails and messages about Amazon Brand Registry and there seems to be a lot of confusion from many sellers as to what it is, what it does, and what you need as the bare minimum in order successful register your brand at Amazon. Most importantly, unless you have a trademark from a verifiable domestic or international government issued trademark office, then you DO NOT own a brand. You are renting a brand, and someone else could challenge your “right” to the brand. Without a government entity awarding you with a certificate on the word or design mark, then Amazon does not see you as owning any brand. You cannot start selling under a brand, and then attempt to register at brandservices.amazon.com without an official registration number. For whatever reason, people are missing this. That needs to be step one.

Verify Your Brand Ownership

Assuming you do have a registered word (text only) or design (logo) mark then you may register as the rights owner for this brand or logo at Amazon’s Brand Registry, and you do not need to be actively selling on the platform in order to do it. It will serve to protect your brand from being completely mis-represented on the site (and this will happen).

Register Your Brand

The registration process is fairly simple, you begin by logging in under your personal name or business email address. You are asked to supply basic company info, registration number, how you want the brand spelled, the categories or industries you operate under, the countries you sell in, if you wholesale/resell/distribute/license the brand or products. After all of these questions Amazon will review the application, and if it all checks out, they email your original trademark registrar, this is the person who registered for trademark approval with your local government agency (USPTO.gov). Normally this person is a trademark lawyer. You will also receive an email to contact this person, and retrieve a code from them to verify authenticity and ownership of the mark. The registrar will need to respond to their email and release use of this code, and also provide you with a copy of the code so you can then present it to Amazon. After this you are assigned “brand rights” within 24 hours.

Verify Your Trademark

You should receive email confirmation that you have brand rights in a congratulatory message, but your work is not over! From here you should log back into brand registry and assign roles for users within the organization permitting others, if applicable to be able to manage functions of the brand. You can select them to be the “rights owner” (highest level or permissions) “administrator” or “editor” (least number of permissions). You will also need to make a separate case within technical subject to sync your brand to your Vendor Central primary vendor code OR your Seller Central “Merchant Token.” This process is very important and verifies that your brand will be sync’d to your store front. If you are a vendor central ONLY brand then you are for the most part done, everything else should sync assuming your brand name attached to your ASIN’s is spelled and capitalized the same as you filed. If you are a Seller Central store owner, I am afraid there is a lot more work!

Sync Your Brand

The brand sync may take 24-72 hours. Once completed you should now have access to additional menus and features such as the ability to upload video, add A+ content, see brand analytics, and create a store page. If you do not see these things in days you need to follow up from brand registry, but this time from creating a ticket in your own store on the Seller Central side. You also need to go through the painstaking process of syncing the ASIN’s to the brand. This part can be irritating to some. Its easiest to do the brand registration first and then begin creating ASIN’s. If you already had a bunch of ASIN’s and registered the brand after then you need to download a category template and conduct a FULL UPDATE on every asin under the brand (using the exact same spelling and capitalization of what is in brand registry) in order for the brand to now link to each asin under the brand. Once you do this and the full product update is accepted without errors than you are fully store and asin sync’d and should have all rights and control over the ASIN’s under your brand. Many Seller Central store owners fail to recognize that this step is necessary, and they register the brand and think they are fully protected, and they aren’t. Amazon does not make this clear to brand owners and many discover this the hard way when a Third party is constantly changing their content or hijacks their listing.

Leveraging Brand Registry Tools

At this point you should now be ready to reap the benefits of your labor and have access to the many brand registry tools, which include:

· A+ Content (EMC)

· Access to Sponsored Brand Ads

· Ability to Create Store Page for the Brand

· Access to Brand Analytics

· Content Protection

· Ability to File Trademark Violations

· Counterfeit protections

Note that Brand Registry IS NOT and CANNOT be used for “gating” and this word, is not something amazon likes to use or talk about, but it’s essentially blocking or limiting other companies from selling your products on Amazon. If you feel you need additional protections against 3rd party resellers who may be selling used inventory as new or counterfeit merchandise you should research Amazon Transparency. This program serializes each unit you manufacture with a unique barcode to prevent items from being sold twice by the same merchant or another merchant.

Conclusion

When you enroll in Transparency, Amazon scans your products to ensure that only authentic units are shipped to customers. Whether fulfilled by Amazon or shipped directly by selling partners, Amazon scans each individual Transparency-enabled code to ensure that only authentic products are shipped.

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