If you’re a seller who makes and sells your own products on Amazon, then you should be signing up for Amazon Brand Registry. Leveraging it allows you to have more control over your products and listings. And the best part of using Brand Registry for Amazon is that it gives you the ability to minimize, or even eradicate, imitations of your product within the ecosystem.

With counterfeit products on a steady rise within the ecosystem, Amazon announced in March 2017 that they will be going after, and removing counterfeit goods from the ecosystem. And true to what they promised, the retail giant has indeed started sending emails pertaining to the new Amazon Brand Registry programme.

This comes as a huge welcome to brands and sellers who have been complaining that the former version of Amazon’s Brand Registry was inadequate.

The main features of Amazon Brand Registry 2.0 (Officially called “new Amazon Brand Registry”) are:

Brand support – Which provides sellers the ability to report any Amazon policy violations
Brand protection – Which is a support for sellers whenever they file a trademark or copyright violation report/complaint.

Brand Protection

Brand Protection gives sellers the power to identify display names of shady sellers, condition of their listed products, where the product originated and its landed price, making it faster to pinpoint shady sellers.

And when it comes to counterfeit and trademark issues, brand owners now have the ability to ask for legally identifiable information.

Brand Support

The biggest complaint sellers have with the previous version of Amazon’s Brand Registry was the time it took for complaints to be addressed. With the 2.0 version, Amazon promises that counterfeit claims will now be acted upon in just 4 hours.

Amazon claimed that this swift turnaround time is due to the company allocating a 300 strong US based team to address counterfeit and infringement complaints.

With the newest version of Brand Registry, the burden of explaining now falls upon the seller in question. And the best part is, the complainant need not even have to do a test buy to submit a complaint.

But Amazon Brand Registry 2.0 is not just all about going after shady sellers. It also includes a feature where brand owners can white-list approved sellers in order to allow authorized Amazon sellers to sell their products.

Now the next question many of you might be thinking is how can this new Brand Registry version protect itself from abuse. Well, Amazon has made a few fail-safes when sending a complaint:

• Complaint must come with an intellectual property information file from the one filing the complaint. File includes: ASIN, email, name, asserted rights etc.
• Complainant must provide a statement verifying that he/she is duly authorized to act on behalf of the aggrieved brand

Important new Amazon Brand Registry Registration Pointers

• Brands that are already enrolled with Amazon Brand Registry 1.0 will not automatically be enrolled in the new brand registry for Amazon system.
• In order for brands to qualify for Amazon Brand Registry 2.0, owners need to provide the brand’s registered trademark along with its corresponding serial number. Amazon will not recognize pending trademarks when registering for the program.
• Be mindful of your spelling when filling up the trademark application for Amazon Brand Registry 2.0. Trademark spelling, including capitalization and spaces, must be an exact match with uspto.gov data.

How To Register For new Amazon Brand Registry

• You need to key in the exact trademark details (including spaces and capital letters) of your brand as it appears on the uspto.gov database.
• You need to enter the correct contact information for the brand’s holder or legal representative.
• A confirmation email will then be sent to the email that used to register the account in order to finalize the registration process.
• Applicant is required to upload any image that the brand will be using for its logo and packaging.
• Once all needed information and confirmation code has been sent and verified, Amazon will then grant the applicant access to Amazon Brand Registry 2.0.

Protecting Your Brand Using “Report a Violation”

If there is one thing that helps separate Amazon Brand Registry 2.0 from its predecessor, its has to be the “Report a Violation” option.

At first glance, it may just look like an ordinary hyperlink. But this new feature is actually a search tool that allows brands to quickly locate any violation towards its intellectual property.

Brands can use the search feature to identify keywords, text and images, much like Google’s reverse search image.

And when a brand locates an unauthorized use of its intellectual property, it can quickly take action against said individual/brand through the more streamlined reporting process of Amazon Brand Registry 2.0.

Take note though that the “Report a Violation” feature only applies to reporting violations associated with trademark copyright infringement. As for infringements associated with patents, brands should report it to Amazon’s original infringement link.

We at SellerLift believe that the new updates to Amazon’s Brand Registry are a step in the right direction. But we can’t help but feel that Amazon still has a few things to clarify, or even add, to the new version in the coming weeks or months to make it even better.

So if you feel the same way, do bookmark this link as we will be updating this post to include news, and further updates, about Amazon Brand Registry 2.0, as well as the sentiment of the Amazon seller community at large towards it.