Amazon Brand Registry: A Complete Guide

With 2.3 million active sellers worldwide,¹ Amazon’s marketplace is a bit like the wild west of e-tailers. It’s a lucrative sales platform, but there are also a lot of potential competitors—wait a minute, that competitor’s products are basically identical to mine!

Sound familiar?

This is a problem that many brands are running into, and one that Amazon Brand Registry seeks to remedy. With increased fears about copycat-listings and overseas ripoffs,² registering and protecting your brand is more important than ever. In fact, when it comes to building a successful eCommerce business, Amazon Marketing and Brand Registry has to be a key piece of your strategy. 

How Does Amazon Brand Registry Work?

Amazon brand registry program is available for eligible brands to enroll in as long as they have an active text-based or image-based trademark. Part of this initiative is, in essence, a way of extending the privileges of a trademark across your company’s Amazon store and product line by removing posts, products, and sellers that infringe on your registered, trademarked brand.

There are two core components to this Amazon brand registry program: building your brand and protecting your brand. Each of these major goals is supported by a suite of tools that helps you and Amazon work together in creating an accurate, enjoyable experience for your customers.

Build Your Brand

As an emerging business, a strong brand is imperative to successful growth. Consistent messaging, a clear voice, and engaging visuals are just a few ways to carve out a distinct identity. 

There are four key brand-building features you’ll unlock by enrolling in Brand Registration, designed to help you solidify that identity, elevate your company’s standing, and maintain a satisfied customer base.

#1 Amazon Store

It’s easy to infuse your website or social media platforms with your company’s personality because you create those yourself, but it’s more difficult to do with a standardized third-party marketplace like Amazon—or else, it used to be, before Amazon Brand Registry.  

Now, you can build an Amazon Store as unique and branded as your company website.

Customizing your multi-page Amazon store with drag-and-drop templates makes it easy for anyone to add more engaging features, including: 

• Multiple pages that showcase different product lines and categories
• Higher quality visuals, such as logos and product images
• Compelling videos that showcase your business
• Humanizing information about the company and founders
• Curated content that really sells what you have to offer

Successful home pages incorporate compelling photos, major selling points, and a visually appealing layout to instantly communicate a level of professionalism that a default Amazon page doesn’t quite capture.

#2 A+ Content

This feature allows sellers to go above and beyond—to put the plus in A+—and create more accurate and unique product descriptions for items in their approved brand catalog. 

Sellers can provide additional detail to preemptively answer customer questions, resulting in fewer product returns or unhappy buyers. There are six types of A+ content that can be added to each product:³

• Comparison charts
• A single image with a sidebar
• Four image highlights
• A single image with specs detail
• A single image with highlights
• Images with light text overlays

Despite the proliferation of possibilities, successful A+ brand content often embraces simplicity. Put yourself in the shopper’s shoes to create a digestible, straightforward seller central layout and determine which selling points would compel you to click “Add to Cart.” 

Remember: You don’t have to do it all just because it’s available.

#3 Amazon Brand Analytics

So, let’s say you’ve created what you think are compelling product descriptions and a visually appealing web page design. However, you just don’t seem to be hitting the numbers you want. Where did you go wrong? 

With Amazon analytics, you can see first-hand how your customers are behaving on your site.

These comprehensive data reports can empower you and your team to make appropriate changes that actively drive the business forward. There are six different reports that you can use to influence your business decisions:

• Item Comparison Report – This shows the five products that customers most frequently viewed on the same day that they viewed your products. You can use this report to identify similar competitor products that may be outperforming yours—and why. 
• Demographics Report – Are you successfully reaching your “target audience”? Find out with detailed breakdowns of your actual customer base by age, household income, education, gender, and marital status. 
• Amazon Search Terms Report – This reveals how customers are arriving at your and your competitor’s Amazon products. It includes the popularity and frequency of search terms as well as the most popular items people clicked on after searching for a specific term. You can use this data to adjust your product’s keywords and pinpoint which competitor products are receiving more attention than yours.
• Repeat Purchase Behavior Report – Customer loyalty says a lot about your brand. This report shows the total order count for each product and the number of unique customers, as well as the number of repeat purchases in a given time. 
• Alternate Purchase Report – Who are you losing customers to? This report shows which products Amazon users purchased on days they looked at, but ultimately didn’t buy your products.
• Market Basket Report – Find out the top three products that Amazon customers are purchasing at the same time that they’re buying your products. This can help identify cross-marketing strategies, bundled promotion ideas, and opportunities for new product development. 

#4 Sponsored Brands

Enrolled Amazon vendors can expand their customer reach with cost-per-click (CPC) ads throughout the Amazon platform. These paid advertisements include your brand logo, a headline of your choice, and up to three products. 

You’ll be able to set the ad campaign’s duration, budget, headline and products, and targeted keywords to enhance your brand strategy. In conjunction with Amazon Brand Analytics data, including search terms and customer behavior reports, you can prepare a crafted marketing strategy to target the right keywords and customers. 

Protect Your Brand

Protecting the integrity and accuracy of your Amazon Store is a top priority for most sellers. With so much Amazon traffic each day, you can’t afford to provide a suboptimal shopping experience for your valued customers. 

To this end, Amazon Brand Registry is already fulfilling its mission to protect the more-than-350,000 registered brands. According to Amazon themselves, they’ve already stopped 2.5 million bad actor accounts and over six million suspected bad listings from ever making it to their site. They claim that, on average, brands using their registry have seen a 99% decrease in suspected infringements since joining.⁴

As an Amazon seller, those odds are pretty compelling.

Specifically, there are three brand protection features that brands can use to their advantage after enrolling in Amazon Brand Registry.

#1 More Control Over Listings

As a business owner, control is everything. Without it, it’s as though someone else is running your company for you—you’re just along for the ride (but not in a fun way).

Before Amazon Brand Registry, the e-tailer’s complex algorithm would compile information from multiple sellers, often resulting in distorted or even wildly inaccurate product listings.

Amazon Brand Registry puts you back in the driver’s seat.

As the brand owner, you’re able to manage your product listings and give customers accurate details, rather than being subjected to the potential inaccuracy of the Amazon algorithm

#2 Proactive Brand Protection

Amazon attempts to identify and remove bad listings based on detailed information about good listings and sellers. This comes from the brand information provided by registered, reputable sellers enrolled in the Brand Registry.

Sellers that provide more specifics are more likely to reap the benefits of Amazon’s automated, proactive service. With an in-depth understanding of your brand’s intellectual property—what your brand and listings should look like—they can flag and take down listings that don’t meet these standards, such as:⁵

• Products that are incorrectly using your trademarked terms
• Unaffiliated sellers without your brand name using your logo
• Foreign sellers in countries that your brand doesn’t manufacture in or distribute from
• New product listings under “your name” when your entire brand catalog is already listed

#3 Powerful Search Tools to Report Violations

Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t catch every infringement case or violation, but they do equip sellers with a few useful tools to better manage it themselves.

Amazon Brand Registry includes:

• Global Search – Access and compare content across all different Amazon stores from one web page. 
• Image Search – Locate counterfeit or copycat listings by searching for images that match your brand’s products or logos.  
• Bulk ASIN Search – Simultaneously search for all of your products’ listing URLs or ASINs (their unique, 10-digit identifying numbers) to quickly find violations.

From there, Amazon makes it relatively easy to report these potential infringements and hopefully review and remedy the situation for you. 

Registering with Amazon Brand Registry

With tools to both protect and strengthen your brand such as with amazon listing optimization, Amazon Brand Registry has very few downsides and plenty of benefits. 

The registration process is simple (not to mention free⁶):

• Check that you meet the eligibility criteria. Most importantly, your brand must have an active registered trademark (text-based or image-based) in the country you’re enrolling in. The trademark owner must submit the application.
• Sign into Amazon Brand Registry. You can sign in using your Seller or Vendor Central log-in, or create a new Amazon account if you don’t have one. The trademark owner must sign in first, and can then add other authorized agents. 
• Enroll your brand. Provide information about your brand, including your active or pending trademark, the trademark registration number, and a list of product categories to be listed under. 

After completing the verification process, you’ll be all set to start using Amazon Brand Registry’s suite of programs. 

Level Up Your Amazon Strategy

As more and more Amazon vendors upgrade to Amazon Brand Registry, the divide between top-notch brands and non-optimized sellers becomes increasingly noticeable. 

Staying competitive is about more than just enrolling in Amazon Brand Registry or other programs offered by Amazon like the Amazon Vine Program—it’s about capitalizing on the brand-building, asset-protecting features to create the best possible customer experience. 

Sources: 

1. Marketplace Pulse. Number of Sellers on Amazon Marketplace. https://www.marketplacepulse.com/amazon/number-of-sellers 
2. JungleScout. 2020: The State of the Amazon Seller. https://www.junglescout.com/staging/amazon-seller-report-old/ 
3. Amazon Seller Central. A+ Content FAQ. https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/help.html?itemID=202102960&language=en_US&ref=efph_202102960_relt_202102950
4. Amazon. Amazon Brand Registry: Build and protect your brand. https://brandservices.amazon.com/ 
5. Tinuiti. Amazon Brand Registry Benefits, Costs, and Setup. https://tinuiti.com/blog/amazon/amazon-brand-registry/ 
6. Amazon. Get started in three steps. https://brandservices.amazon.com/eligibility