Amazon Brand Registry is a program designed to help with that by making it easier for brand owners to manage their brands and report counterfeit listings on Amazon.com. Once you’ve acquired federal trademark registration, you have a duty to maintain your mark. That includes making sure others aren’t misusing your registered trademark on the internet, such as social media. Similarly, you want to keep watch for others infringing on your mark in e-commerce. This is especially true on Amazon.com.
The Amazon Brand Registry 2.0 offers a path to online brand protection.
How Does Amazon Brand Registry Work?
The first iteration of Amazon Brand Registry offered limited utility, mostly focused on the content and method of identifying your own listings. However, with the launch of Amazon Brand Registry 2.0, Amazon introduced new tools giving brand owners greater control over how their brands and intellectual property are listed. Primarily, it provides a new “Report a Violation” tool that facilitates the reporting of sellers who are misusing your intellectual property, such as copyrighted images and trademarks. At the same time, Amazon Brand Registry 2.0 allows brand owners to add enhanced content to their brand listings, with the intent of helping you to build your brand awareness and customer loyalty.
What Are the Benefits of Joining Amazon Brand Registry?
Enrollment in the Amazon Brand Registry provides a variety of benefits, including:
- Access to powerful tools for identifying infringing and counterfeit listings, such as proprietary text and image search.
- Predictive automation based on your reporting of intellectual property rights violations.
- Greater control over listing content for your brands by giving you increased control over your products’ attributes.
These tools allow brand owners more direct control over how their brands are presented on Amazon, and facilitate easier identification and reporting of listings that infringe on their intellectual property.
Trademarks and the Amazon Brand Registry
One of the main things to keep in mind is that in order to be a part of the Amazon brand registry, you need to have a valid United States trademark registration (the Amazon benefits are in addition to the traditional trademark registration benefits). Specifically, you need to have a registration and not simply an application – and the application must be on the primary register, and not the supplemental trademark register. There are a few more trademark requirements, so it’s good to give it some thought in advance.
What’s Required to Join Amazon Brand Registry?
Registering with Amazon Brand Registry isn’t a difficult process, but there are a number of requirements you’ll need to be aware of. Most importantly, your brand must have a live, active registered trademark to be eligible. The trademark must be a “standard character mark” (meaning for USPTO marks, the Mark Drawing Type must be “4 – STANDARD CHARACTER MARK” or “1 – TYPESET WORD(S)/LETTER(S)/NUMBER(S)”), and the trademark must match the brand name printed on products and/or packaging. In addition, you will need to provide the following information to Amazon:
- Government Registered Principal Trademark Registration or Serial Number
- Images of your brand’s logo.
- Images of products and packaging that carry your trademarked brand name. (Note that if the product is not branded, the packaging must be branded.)
- A list of product categories in which your brand should be listed.
- A list of countries where your brand’s products are manufactured and distributed.
Are you interested in using Amazon Brand Registry but don’t yet have a registered trademark? A smart first step is to learn more about how to get a registered trademark that will work with the Amazon Brand Registry.
