Managing the different aspects of merchandising products, producing high-quality items, tuning listings, and encouraging long-term customer loyalty, requires a good amount of effort.
When unauthorized sellers step in, the impact on your ecommerce operations goes beyond just a few lost sales. It can majorly undermine brand integrity and hurt profit margins, especially for reseller networks.
You may be wondering how to protect your brand and prevent unauthorized sellers from damaging your reputation and profits on platforms like Amazon. Here’s how you can stop them in their tracks.
Key Takeaways 💡
- Unauthorized sellers are third-party sellers offering your products without permission, often at reduced prices, damaging brand integrity and violating pricing policies.
- Impact on your business: These sellers can cause lost sales, reduce profit margins by creating price wars, and harm your brand’s reputation with inaccurate product listings.
- Where they operate: Unauthorized sellers frequently use major online platforms like Amazon, eBay, and Walmart, where they undercut pricing and disrupt reseller networks.
- Removing unauthorized sellers on Amazon: Legal measures like cease-and-desist letters or using Amazon’s Brand Registry and “Report a Violation” tools can help tackle unauthorized listings.
- Proactive steps: Regular price tracking and automated tools for monitoring and repricing can help authorized sellers stay competitive while protecting your brand’s minimum advertised price (MAP) agreements.
- Our platform monitors listings and automates pricing, helping you stay informed about potential unauthorized sellers.
- While we don't directly identify these sellers, our tools can bring them to your attention, making it easier to protect your brand across multiple marketplaces.
Let's dive into more details!
Who are unauthorized sellers and why they are a problem for brands?
A third-party unauthorized seller is any seller of your products that sells without your permission. These types of sellers commonly buy in bulk and sell, oftentimes cheaper in most instances, without regard to your brand guidelines.
This practice can disrupt your minimum advertised price (MAP) agreements, brand standards, and overall values. Sometimes, they may use your brand’s name or even create a new one to appear legitimate.
Unauthorized sellers can negatively impact your business in several ways:
- Losing sales to unauthorized sellers: By pricing your products below the suggested retail price, unauthorized sellers attract customers who would otherwise buy from your approved resellers. On Amazon, they may even set up multiple listings to increase visibility and improve their chances of winning the Buy Box.
- Reducing profit margins: By ignoring your MAP policy, unauthorized sellers trigger price wars where all sellers are forced to lower their prices to stay competitive. This reduction in pricing cuts into net profits, often causing approved resellers to abandon your products altogether.
- Hurting your brand’s reputation: Because such unauthorized resellers are not your affiliates, they could then be posting inaccurate product listings, maybe using very old photos or other wrong descriptions. Poor customer experiences because of such errors reflect badly on your brand and will erode trust and customer loyalty in the long run.
Common places where unauthorized sellers operate
Most unauthorized resellers sell across major online platforms like Amazon, eBay, or Walmart, from where they can easily create disorder for your company. While these are great platforms for extending reach, they equally afford opportunities for unauthorized resellers to post your products at cheaper prices that can hurt your brand reputation and turn reseller relationships upside down.
Amazon, in particular, sees a high prevalence of unauthorized sellers due to its vast size and global accessibility. The ease with which anyone can list items on Amazon makes it a prime target for unauthorized sales, making brand protection more challenging. Understanding where these sellers thrive is the first step toward reclaiming control over your brand.
How can you remove unauthorized sellers on Amazon?
Legal measures
When you've tried every option and unauthorized sellers continue to appear, it might be time to consider legal action. Engaging a lawyer to send a cease-and-desist letter could be the necessary step to halt their activities.
However, some unapproved sellers avoid repercussions by hiding behind shell companies or using multiple online identities. In such cases, perhaps a harm reduction methodology may be better. This doesn't remove the problem but makes it difficult for unauthorized sellers to sell your product and resell it.
Keep in mind that while legal action can be a powerful way to stop unauthorized sellers, it is often costly and time-consuming.
Using Amazon’s internal tools
If your brand is officially registered, take advantage of Amazon’s Brand Registry to safeguard your products on the platform.
The registry offers enhanced tools and support for brand protection. It is very important to ensure that your brand is registered before you get in touch with Amazon since they always focus on trying to assist registered brands. You will be enabled to take action against any unauthorized sellers once access to the infringement reporting tools is provided upon registration.
You can also use Amazon’s “Report a Violation” tool. Through this feature, you can report unauthorized sellers and present evidence that they are listing your products without permission.
Taking proactive steps with marketplace control
Regularly tracking prices can help you and your authorized sellers avoid scrambling to adjust pricing as the market shifts downward. It can also alert you to unauthorized sellers when they begin to undercut your established pricing thresholds.
However, manual price tracking is impractical, especially in the fast-paced world of global ecommerce. Automated repricing tools take the burden off by constantly monitoring and adjusting prices in real-time. These tools enable authorized sellers to remain competitive while adhering to your MAP policy.
By partnering with authorized sellers and implementing better control over distribution, you can maintain pricing integrity and protect your brand.
How ChannelEngine can help
We offer powerful tools to help brands monitor their product listings and enforce pricing policies across multiple marketplaces, including Amazon. By integrating with our tools, you gain more control over your product listings and are a step closer to finding unauthorized sellers.
With our marketplace integration software, you can monitor your product listings and automate pricing. While we don't directly identify these sellers, our tools can bring them to your attention, making it easier to protect your brand across multiple marketplaces.
This comprehensive approach allows you to safeguard your brand across multiple marketplaces, reducing the impact of unauthorized sellers and keeping your product listings compliant.
Preventing unauthorized sellers in the future
Establishing a clear distribution strategy
Alternatively, consider the selective distribution model that might afford better control and exclusivity, other than selling the products to distributors who would sell the products to retailers, consumers, and unauthorized sellers. It allows you to select only a network of certain authorized distributors and retailers that meet your specific criteria with care.
By doing so, you can restrict these sellers from operating outside the approved network, ensuring they only sell directly to end consumers, and providing a more secure and manageable distribution channel.
Using technology for brand protection
Technology plays an important role in protecting your brand from unauthorized selling and harming products. Equipped with the proper tool, you will be able to know where exactly your products are being sold and alerted if there is some violation of your brand guidelines.
Automated tracking systems enable you to detect suspicious activity, such as pricing discrepancies or unauthorized listings, and take action before these issues escalate. We offer a multi-channel ecommerce solution that is invaluable for streamlining your distribution and monitoring sellers across multiple platforms.
With powerful tracking and reporting, we let you stay on top of your product listings, reduce the risk of unauthorized resellers, and control your distribution network. These technologies can be integrated into your brand protection strategy, placed at the front of your defense for your brand's reputation, and avoid future problems regarding unauthorized sellers.
Stay on top of unauthorized sellers
Proactively managing and removing unauthorized sellers is important to maintain your brand’s integrity on online marketplaces. The right approach, including legal measures, utilizing Amazon’s internal tools, and employing advanced marketplace management strategies, can lower the impact of unapproved sellers.
We offer comprehensive solutions that help monitor product listings and enforce pricing policies that can eventually help you identify unauthorized sellers across multiple platforms. Our automated tools take the burden off manual tracking, allowing you to stay competitive without too much hassle.
Our goal is to give you the power to protect your brand’s reputation and control your distribution channels.
Book a free consultation with us to see how we can help you automate marketplace management and protect your brand across global ecommerce channels.
