Do I need to register my brand on Amazon?

So you’ve decided to start selling on Amazon – congratulations! Welcome to the jungle. A question we often face from new sellers is what’s the deal with registering brands on Amazon? Let’s take a look.

Let’s get planning!

What is the Amazon Brand Registry?

The Amazon Brand Registry was designed to help identify brand owners and help them protect their brand. The team at Amazon work to detect and block counterfeit products and brands, protecting registered businesses from potential infringements.

Registering brands on Amazon is free by simply submitting your business’ trademark details. It’s not a mandatory requirement to join the Registry, but there are certainly some huge benefits that can help you with selling on Amazon.

It’s simple to sign up – and free!

1. Protection

A huge benefit is protection, not just of your brand and product designs, but of your copy and images that are used on your listings as well. You’d be amazed how many copy and paste jobs we find. You can also report any that you find yourself, with Amazon’s team on call 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

2. Access to additional selling tools

There are some great extra tools available when you join the Brand Registry. These include:

• Videos – The option to add videos to listings, something we would definitely recommend based on the surge in video marketing this year
• A+ Content – a great marketing tool that really makes your listings stand out from the competition, giving them a more visual, sleek and professional feel rather than bombarding your potential customers with a wall of text.
• Review programme – Amazon Vine, a programme where you can pay to submit your products to be sent out to trusted reviewers to get fresh, honest reviews written on your listings.
• Brand Stores – a fantastic way to implement clear, stylish and unique branding and showcase all your products in one place. Take a look at the example below, a Brand Store we created for one of our clients.

Stylish and unique branding with Amazon is right at your fingertips.

3. Opportunities to use powerful advertising tools

Registering brands on Amazon gives you access to powerful advertising tools that will put you ahead of the competition – quite literally! Say hello to sponsored adverts. These include opportunities to create sponsored adverts to promote your brand or specific products (including video ads – check out an example below), as well as access to Sponsored Display ads and self service Demand Side Platform so you can reach new and existing audiences on and off of Amazon.

4. Brand Analytics

The in depth brand analytics will inevitably help you with your marketing strategy. You can assess how your products appear in searches, customer behaviour, search terms, item comparisons and the conversion rate. You can even run experiments with A/B testing to see what content works best for your products.

5. Amazon Attributions

This is a great tool that allows businesses to measure how your offsite marketing impacts your brand’s activity and sales on Amazon. You can create offsite links to use on your social media pages and website advertising to get additional analytics on the behaviour of your customers, right down to basket level. This allows you to make more informed decisions about your campaign strategy to maximise your sales.

Handy tools to help improve your marketing strategy.

Do I have to join the brand registry to sell on Amazon?

Like we said, it’s not essential for businesses to enrol in the Amazon Brand Registry in order to sell on Amazon. Not doing so does open you up to a few risks.

Without trademarking and enrolling, it does increase your chances of coming across counterfeiters and knock offs. The market can start to get overcrowded…and quickly. Quite often you’ll see similar products sold at a cheaper price – why? So they can outdo the competition of course! The only way to beat them is to then start dropping prices, which realistically no business wants to do.

If you’ve got any questions about registering brands on Amazon, feel free to get in touch.