Posts

Showing posts from August 27, 2017

Amazon’s New and Improved Brand Registry

  These days owning your own business on Amazon — and proving the business is yours — is not as simple as one might think. In fact, it has become quite common on Amazon for competitors to usurp listings that do not belong to them and repurpose them to list their own counterfeit merchandise. The practice is unfair and filches money away from business owners. And righting this unscrupulous wrong? Well, it is a little more complicated than picking up the phone and shouting righteously at Amazon Support. In the past when dealing with fraudulent sellers, Amazon has required business owners to issue a formal request for removal with its Seller Support team. It is a tiresome and lengthy process, and in some cases it can prove to be surprisingly difficult to prove legal ownership. As 2016 was a year especially rife with bogus listings, Amazon has addressed this issue head on with a brand new registry that allows companies to register their brands. The new version of the brand regist...

Vendor Central vs Third-Party

Brand owners on Amazon have a significant choice to make when it comes to selling their merchandise to customers. Do they choose to become a first party seller, using the Vendor Central interface, to sell directly to Amazon Retail? Or do they themselves become a third party seller — or hire a third partner seller — to manage their brand? Ultimately the pros and cons list varies, and it’s up to the brand owner to figure out the best strategy for their business. While the benefits of third-party (3P) selling do tend to outweigh first-party (1P) selling, here is how it all breaks down: * * * When it comes to controlling your brand, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and loss of sales from your own sales domain, there isn’t a discernible difference between 1P and 3P selling.  The same goes for shipping and accounting and reporting and analytics. Brand Control : Either way the seller does possess a considerable amount of control over how their merchandise is sold. The 3P seller might have...