3 Ways to Protect Your Amazon Listings

You’ve worked hard to develop or source a shiny new product, get good photos and videos to go with it, optimize the listing, and list it on the Amazon marketplace. You’ve spent money on your Amazon listings from advertising, analyzing keywords, and promoting it in every way you can. The sales are finally starting to come in.

Or maybe, you have a well-established Amazon listing that sits comfortably near the top of its category and provides a lot of the bread-and-butter for your business. You’ve relied on it for years, and so have your buyers.

Either way, the idea of someone damaging that listing is probably your worst nightmare. Yet on Amazon, it happens all the time. Hijackers and copycats siphon away your best shoppers, selling them an inferior counterfeit product. Ill-informed resellers (or Amazon robots) try to make “improvements” to listings they know nothing about and end up making a mess. Worst of all, Amazon suddenly enforces old policies, initiates new ones, or simply misunderstands your keywords, and your innocent listing goes to jail.

As terrible as all of this sounds, there’s hope! You can protect your listings from many of these dangers with a little planning and monitoring. Rather than waiting for an emergency, try these three ways to proactively protect your Amazon listings, starting today.

3 ways to protect your amazon listings

1. Review the Guidelines

To protect your listings against actions Amazon might take to suppress, deactivate, or make them ineligible for the Buy Box, review all Amazon policies regularly and ensure you’re obeying them.

The main pages to check are the Communication Guidelines, Product Review Policies, and the Selling Policies and Seller Code of Conduct. Bookmark them and put a reminder on your calendar to review them about once a month.

Also, look out for any announcements in Seller Central that might refer to a policy change. Read the News section of the Seller Forums and any new alerts you see on your Dashboard.And, if you ever have a question about how to interpret a policy, double check with experts before taking any action. For example, this AI chatbot can provide simple answers to questions about Amazon’s Terms of Service, and its creators are qualified to answer more in-depth questions if you need further help.

2. Enroll in Amazon Brand Registry

If you have your own brand, enroll it in Amazon Brand Registry. This is the first step to accessing lots of listing protection benefits, especially ways to protect your brand’s listings from bad actors.

To sign up, you’ll need to have an active registered trademark or a pending trademark application in each country where you want to enroll. This trademark should appear on your product or packaging.

Once you visit the Brand Registry signup page and provide the trademark number or application number, along with a list of categories where your brand should appear, Amazon will verify that you are the brand owner before allowing you to access the benefits. You can learn more about the Brand Registry process and benefits here.

Once you are a registered brand owner, you’ll have access to lots of benefits that can help protect your listings, including the Amazon Transparency program and easy trademark infringement reporting. Amazon also states that it will automatically detect and block “bad listings,” e.g. black-hat competitors who try to copy your products.

Plus, according to the Seller Forums and experts, sellers with Brand Registry can usually maintain more control over their listing details and prevent competitors from hijacking them.

3. Listing Monitoring Tool

Whether or not you have your own brand, you should monitor your listings for new competing offers, image and detail changes, Buy Box loss, and more. This is easy to do with a software tool.

Amazon listing monitoring software such as SellerPulse by eComEngine can alert you whenever something happens that deserves your attention, enabling you to take action quickly to correct any problems. The quicker you can report bad actors to Amazon or correct inaccurate listing details, the better for your sales and your product’s reputation.

A good listing monitoring tool should include:

  • Alerts when significant changes are made to the listing content, especially changes to the main image, title, or brand name.
  • Notifications when someone else joins the listing or wins the Buy Box, including details about the other seller’s offer.
  • Alerts when the whole listing gets suppressed (cannot be found in search results), deactivated (cannot be purchased by buyers), or categorized as “Adult” (making it ineligible for advertising and difficult to find in search).
  • Ideally, a history of all these events so you can notice any patterns that might inform your strategy going forward.
  • The ability to adjust which alerts you want to receive, for which products, and how often, so you can focus on whatever is most important to your business.

Of course, a good listing monitoring tool should also be available in the Selling Partner Appstore. Look for the listing before signing up and giving the tool access to your Amazon Seller Central data.As a bonus, these listing alert tools are sometimes bundled with other tools and features, such as product review monitoring and feedback and review improvement, which can further insulate your product by solidifying its good reputation compared to the competition. Again, be sure you’re following all relevant policies when using these tools, and look for the Amazon partner logos.

A Little Goes a Long Way

Taking a few hours and a few dollars to set up a good listing monitoring tool, re-read the Amazon policies, and apply for Brand Registry if you’re eligible, will pay huge dividends in the long run. If one or two of your best-selling products get hijacked or shut down by Amazon, your business could suffer and even fail. A little investment of time and money now can prevent these emergencies from arising and might even help you make strategic improvements to your catalog. 

As Customer Education Manager at eComEngine, Rachel Hoover helps Amazon sellers connect with their customers and manage their seller reputations. She is committed to helping each seller find the right email strategy to improve feedback ratings, gain product reviews, and enhance customer service.