Ensuring Your Brand is Protected

Prime Day has quickly become one of the most important sales events of the year. 2021’s Prime Day sales topped 11 billion dollars in the US alone. As a seller, you can expect to see increased traffic to your product listings, new customers engaging with your brand, and sales, sales, and sales. This high visibility sales event also has a reputation for attracting “opportunistic” sellers to the marketplace and can cause longer-lasting damage to your brand’s reputation. To ensure your brand is protected from bad actors and is as successful as possible during Prime Day, you will need to prepare.

We’ve compiled a list of tips and tricks to help your brand to make the most of this year’s Prime Day. 

Identifying and removing unauthorized sellers

Given that Amazon is a massive marketplace, you’ll find that various unauthorized sellers are either trying to piggyback on your product, intentionally violating copyright, patent, or trademark laws, posting fake reviews, or doing something else to sabotage your listing entirely . 

Unauthorized sellers are going to flood Amazon leading up to  Prime Day, but there are steps you can take to keep them off of your listings: 

• Trademark your Amazon brand and join Amazon’s Brand Registry
• You can make it difficult for a seller to copy your brand by placing your logo on your product and packaging 
• You can use an Amazon barcode (FNSKU) instead of a manufacturer barcode (UPC) 
• Always opt-in for a two-step log-in on Seller Central 
• Use Amazon listing alerts to monitor suspicious activity on your postings
• Use Amazon transparency to add additional protection, and/or utilize Amazon Project Zero. Amazon Project Zero is currently on an invite-only basis and offers the most protection.  

Amazon Anti-Counterfeiting Policy
Products offered for sale on Amazon must be authentic. The sale of counterfeit products is strictly prohibited. Failure to abide by this policy may result in loss of selling privileges, funds being withheld, and disposal of inventory in our possession.

Source: Amazon Seller Central. Amazon Anti-Counterfeiting Policy 

Balance pricing to win the buy box at MAP

90% of Amazon’s sales are driven by their Buy Box feature. Owning the Buy Box during Prime Day is key to seeing the related boost in sales.    

To win the Buy Box, you’ll need first to make sure that your products are Buy Box eligible. There are many things you can do to step up your competitive edge towards eligibility, but one of the most important things you can do is to ensure that your product’s landed price is affordable. This includes not just the cost of the product, but also the shipping and handling costs. You’ll want to keep your prices low and consistent with other sellers.  It is also important to manage your brand pricing across all of your resale channels and to leverage MAP, or minimum advertised price, to ensure that you do not have sellers purchasing your products through other channels and then competing with you for the Buy Box on Amazon at a lower price. 

Keep an eye on your competition because fellow sellers are constantly reducing their sell prices, sometimes even by pennies, in order to win the Buy Box.  If your brand has many product listings and is competing with multiple sellers it may be worth leveraging an automated repricer to help ensure you wining your share of the Buy Box during this critical time of the year. 

Managing buyer-initiated cancellation requests

As of April 27th, Amazon implemented changes in its process for managing buyer cancellation requests. They hope that this new process makes it easier and more efficient for sellers. Heading into Prime Day, you must be aware of this update as a brand. 

With the new changes, sellers can either find any cancellation requests under the “Manage Orders” page and then head to order reports (if you use Seller Central), or if you use APIs, you can find them under the “List Order Items API.” While you’ll no longer be notified of cancellations through the buyer-seller messaging feature, you’ll still be able to utilize this feature as a messaging tool to contact customers directly. 

These simple steps will help you get the most sales and keep competition, away during Prime Day and beyond. At Phelps UNITED, we make Amazon work for YOUR brand. That means when Prime Day hits, we’re here to help you navigate the entire process to ultimately help you grow your business.

It’s never too early to start preparing for Prime Day. Get in touch with our team today to learn how we can add value to you and your brand on Prime Day and all year long.