Amazon sellers’ measures to deal with malicious competition

Although 84% of Amazon sellers said they had not experienced account freezes in the past year, many sellers are victims of malicious competition, such as malicious follow-up sales, malicious negative reviews, malicious complaints, etc. There are also some organizations that specialize in providing malicious competition services. Malicious competition is very common on the Amazon platform. In serious cases, malicious competition can lead to seller account freezes.

How to deal with and prevent malicious competition? The following will introduce it to you in detail.

Common malicious competition methods include malicious follow-selling and abuse of listings. The targets of malicious follow-selling are often private-label products that usually have a sales history and high product ratings. Some sellers with bad intentions provide counterfeit products under these listings, causing the original products to lose sales and reduce product ratings. Some sellers also reported that product listings were modified, and pictures and product descriptions were tampered with, resulting in sellers being fined for problems such as inconsistent descriptions.

To avoid being copied, sellers can take the following measures:

To have brand control, you need to register for Amazon Brand Registry. Registering for Brand Registry prevents other sellers from modifying product information without your consent. Brand Registry can increase your control over product detail pages and build your brand credibility.

You can also join Amazon’s Project Zero program , which provides brands with tools to monitor their listings and remove counterfeit products.

Prominently display your logo and trademark on your products . Make sure your products have their own brand characteristics, making it difficult for copycats to imitate and easier for customers to notice the difference.

In addition to checking your listings in the backend, it is recommended that you also check your listings from the frontend to ensure that you are the only seller of your brand products . Check ASINs regularly, especially if sales suddenly drop.

To limit fraudulent activity by competitors , keep your purchase invoices to prove you purchased your stock from an authorized distributor.

Conduct a purchase test to prove that the product is a counterfeit or inferior product.

Sometimes the solution to a hijacker is to contact them directly and ask them to remove the product. Be brief and to the point. If they don’t respond in a timely manner, contact Amazon.

You can file a complaint with Amazon for infringement and be prepared with screenshots and evidence to prove that the product is counterfeit. It is best to buy the counterfeit product and take photos for evidence.

Reviews are very important, and 79% of consumers will check product reviews before buying. In addition to reviews, many sellers use malicious negative reviews to damage the reputation of competitors, such as leaving 5-star or 1-star reviews on product pages, and then using words such as fake, harm, fear, safety, sick, counterfeit, etc. Or give a large number of good reviews to competitors, triggering Amazon's monitoring algorithm, resulting in sellers being fined for product problems, false reviews, etc., or even having their accounts frozen.

Amazon estimates that 90% of fake reviews are machine-generated and says the platform uses machine learning technology to analyze reviews and remove inauthentic content.

Sellers can take the following steps to prevent the problem of malicious reviews:

1. Set up real-time alerts for product categories, whether they receive positive or negative reviews;

2. Regularly review return reports to understand buyers’ real thoughts;

3. If there are fake five-star reviews, inform Amazon before they freeze your account. If there is anything suspicious about your listing, report it to Amazon immediately.

There are many ways to maliciously file a complaint for infringement. A common situation is that sellers maliciously impersonate brand owners, register Amazon brand records and patent trademarks using other sellers’ brand materials, and then file a complaint against the original seller for infringement .

In response to this kind of infringement complaint, Amazon will immediately freeze your listing, and then the seller who made the malicious complaint can take this opportunity to improve their ranking and sales.

It is understood that malicious complaints of infringement often occur in the field of design patents. Malicious sellers look for products with unique designs, then register trademarks, release identical products, and then complain that you have infringed their design patents.

Malicious infringement complaints include complaints about counterfeit goods, trademark infringement, copyright infringement , etc.

Practices for dealing with malicious infringement complaints include: