As per a recent survey by Feedvisor, 89% of the buyers trust Amazon than any other eCommerce site. With over 300 million customers, 2.5 million sellers, and an estimated 100 million Prime members, Amazon has built one of the most sophisticated e-commerce platforms by selling more than 4000 items a minute
Whether you are a brand owner or a seller on Amazon you must know the right way to showcase your products on Amazon. Once you have started selling on Amazon, a lot of things can go wrong with your listings, such as other sellers tagging your listings into their account, your products are sold by various sellers or you being unable to upload/update the content of your listing.
In this article, I am going to talk about, how I helped my client, whose listings were being poached upon by the prying sellers by simplifying his catalog and solving the issues. But before getting started we must know a few things.
UNDERSTANDING THE CONTROL OF DETAIL PAGES
The landing page for any product is the detail page. It is the detail page where the content, discounts, and buy button are present. There are essentially three things that control the detail page of any product on Amazon.
SELLER CONTRIBUTION
Any seller who is selling on Amazon can contribute to listing by submitting content (photos, product features, title, and description) via seller central. When multiple sellers are tagging a single listing into their seller accounts and contributing to the content of the product. So, it becomes hard for Amazon to decide which content to show or which to reject. For this, Amazon uses product sales and relevancy as two factors to display the content which is most appropriate.
BRAND REGISTRY
If a brand or a seller applies for Brand Registry Program on Amazon, they can control the content on the detail page and override any available content that was submitted before. There is an elaborate process in place for registering your brand on Amazon, then you can control what to display on your detail pages, which we will discuss later in this article
VENDOR CENTRAL
At any time, a brand owner, manufacturer, distributor, or retailer sells products directly on Amazon via Vendor Central, the content submitted via Vendor Central will retain priority and will even override Brand Registry. These are known as “Retail Contributions.”
UNDERSTANDING DUPLICATE LISTINGS
Sellers are more likely to create duplicate listings or will copy your listings to their accounts and will start selling counterfeit products. The main reason why they copy your listings because they want to have their own listings to which they can drive traffic from advertisements without having to fight for the Buybox button from different sellers. Fighting for Buybox means when sellers adjust their price to the lowest deal to attract sales to their account.
Now we will see how we can take control of the listing by doing some simple things.
PARENT CHILD VARIATIONS
If you have a big range of products that falls under a category, for them, you can list those in a product variation theme undersize, colour, quantity or flavours. By doing this all your products will come under a single detail page allowing the customers to avoid the hard work of going through all your products. With the help of multiple child variations, you will be able to control your listings. Furthermore, if one of your products has good customer reviews and ratings you will be able to copy all the ratings and reviews to all the products, resulting in more sales.
You can create the multiple child variations in the template provided by seller central. You need to create a parent ASIN and add the parent SKU for the child ASINS as shown in the below image.
APPLYING BRAND REGISTRY ON AMAZON
Amazon has now given an upper edge to sellers who have legitimate brands under their portfolio. Now you can register one or multiple brands under one umbrella. The main reason why they introduced a brand registry, as it will allow the brand owners to gain control of their listings as well as easily report counterfeit infringements.
Registering your brand on Amazon with a brand registry is a rather simpler task. Open the link – (https://brandregistry.Amazon .com/), and log in with your seller central or vendor central credentials. Then, you need to validate your information and provide the trademark number as well as the origin and current status of the brand.
Furthermore, you will need high-resolution photos of your brand logo and the products. They will also ask the domain of your brand to cross-check the authenticity of your brand. The process of brand registry will take about a week and you will receive an email with alphanumeric code which you need to submit to the support. If your brand is eligible you will have an approved notification confirm the registering of your brand on Amazon.
ACTIVATING BRAND REGISTRY FOR CURRENT LISTINGS
Registering your brand on Amazon is not going to automatically solve all your problems. You need to activate the brand registry for all your current listings. For that, you need to partially update with the help of Product ID (EAN or UPC) with the information that is required in the template. This will assign your products under the Brand Registry Program.
To check which of your products comes under Brand Registry go to Reports – Business Reports – Brand Performance. Products with activated Brand Registry will be listed here.
FILING COUNTERFEIT OR LISTING INFRINGEMENTS
Creating a new listing when the same product is already listed or a seller using your trademarked brand or selling fake products or using your photographs and content on the detail page, in all these cases, Amazon considers this as a violation of their laws and regulations. If you find such cases, Amazon has given the privilege to file an infringement case for the removal of such cases.
When you are submitting an infringement case on Amazon, you need to specify why the reason, and moreover the Amazon will check the authenticity of the case before taking any actions. So, be sure before submitting any report to Amazon, otherwise, there will be strict consequences. You can file infringement by following this link – (https://www.Amazon .in/report/infringement).
MERGING DUPLICATE LISTINGS
Amazon wants to keep its platform as clean as possible. So, they have given sellers the ability to merge duplicate listings. Being a customer-oriented platform Amazon does not want customers to get confused due to duplicate listings. Merging duplicate listings will also give you benefits. It will aggregate the product reviews and ratings and increases the sales rank. If somehow merged listings are creating a problem, you can always un-merge them by generating a case with Amazon. Also, if Amazon finds any error in their system, they will automatically unmerge them.
CONCLUSION
Selling on Amazon is easy once all the complications have been resolved. Gaining control of your listing provides you an upper edge against your competitive sellers and brands. With the control over listings, you will be able to showcase your products with better descriptions and attractive images which will lead to more sales.
