As a team of eCommerce consultants, we are often asked by brand owners, “How are people allowed to sell my products on Amazon without my permission?”. Well, Amazon focuses on providing consumers an unparalleled buying experience with competitive prices. So, the platform allows the sale of goods as long as they are legally obtained, irrespective of whether it’s from the original seller or an unauthorized one.
An unauthorized seller is a third-party retailer with no official relationship with your brand or dealership network, and no right to resell your products to customers on Amazon.
These sellers can damage brand reputation by selling counterfeit products, affect customer perception, and most importantly, steal sales from you!
One of our clients had a major challenge, wherein for every original product listing, there were 0.5 phony product variations and 1.5 duplicate listings. This was not only detrimental to their brand value, but also their sales, with an observed drop of 25% in the Buy Box appearance. We employed a range of data-driven techniques to create a comprehensive list of all the sellers and helped them identify the ones cannibalizing their sales.
While this was a specific case that we dealt with, unauthorized sellers on the platform operate in a variety of ways:
It is necessary to identify these issue listings and their sellers on Amazon. If your ASINs are few, you can do this manually. However, an automated system to identify the issues is quite useful.
The loss of Buy Box is the most devastating to a brand, causing massive loss of revenue. Since Amazon wants to offer customers the most competitive pricing and does not view unauthorized sellers as violators unless there are copyright or intellectual property infringements, it does not get extensively involved in unauthorized seller related matters. And so, it becomes critical for sellers to protect their brand through other measures.
All in all, with the growing dominance of eCommerce, this problem is bound to increase in future and hence, needs to be handled proactively. You can utilize the aforementioned options to protect your brand credibility and effectively control pricing. You must also be vigilant in continually tracking and identifying unauthorized sellers on Amazon. Since manually doing this may be a cumbersome and time-consuming process, Growisto has developed an AI-based tool to identify potential unauthorized sellers and counterfeit products on Amazon.
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