Jennifer has spent the last 6+ years at Kaspien learning the ins and outs of the Amazon search engine. She created and led Kaspien's SEO team during this time. In her current role, Jenn provides marketing support of all types for critical initiatives.
This post will be updated regularly as the offerings through Amazon Brand Registry platform change.
Latest update: April 2021
If you are selling your own products on Amazon, the next best thing you can do for your brand is apply for Amazon Brand Registry. Anyone with an active registered trademark can apply, and once you do, it opens the door to a vast amount of benefits and marketing tools that far too few brand owners are taking advantage of. After your application has been accepted, you’ll gain access to a few immediate benefits, as well as an ever-growing list of powerful marketing and research tools.
Learn How to Enroll in Brand Registry
Benefits of Amazon Brand Registry
Brand Integrity Protection
One of the more common struggles brands encounter while selling on Amazon is keeping their content on the listing detail page accurate and looking as they desire. The fact is that anybody, authorized seller or not, can come into an Amazon listing and publish unauthorized content changes. Sometimes, these listing edits are innocent; other times, they’re malicious and indicate an attempted hijacking.
Amazon Brand Registry Roles
When your brand is registered with Amazon, only authorized accounts can make changes to your listings. Authorized accounts include your own brand’s account or any other account to which you’ve assigned a role.
There are three tiers of roles you can assign to other Amazon accounts, and each has their own level of permissions. If an account holds any of these roles, they are permitted to make listing edits. If anybody else attempts to edit through a ticket with Amazon, they will immediately receive a rejection notice. The three available roles are:
Administrator: An individual who has full permission to assign roles to user accounts
Rights Owner: An individual who is the rights owner or an employee of the rights owner who is authorized to report violations
Registered Agent: A third party who is authorized by the rights owner to report violations
Amazon will use all the information you provide during your application process to protect your brand on the Amazon market. This tool can alert you when products are incorrectly using your trademarked terms or logos and when product listings are being created with your brand name after you have already listed your full catalog on Amazon. It can even notify you when sellers are shipping products from countries you do not manufacture or distribute to.
There is also a manual search tool you can use to proactively find infringement violations. Whether you are using the global, image, or bulk ASIN search, once you find violators, Amazon will guide you through the steps to submit reports of potential infringement. Once these have been reported, Amazon will investigate the accusations on your behalf and take appropriate action on the potential violators.
Now, here’s the fun part of Amazon Brand Registry: You gain access to more marketing tools! These services are ever changing; many services are released through Brand Registry, such as Brand Stores and Enhanced Brand Content, but occasionally, Amazon will phase out services that are either outdated or are no longer of value.
Customer Engagement Emails
In April 2021, Amazon launched a pilot program that would allow brands enrolled in Brand Registry to email consumers who had opted to “follow” their brand on Amazon. The tool is called “Manage Your Customer Engagement,” and is intended to allow brands to better engage their most interested customers. A video published by Amazon describes several use cases, including announcing new product launches and promotions.
At first, this program seems like a significant shift in what user data Amazon makes available to sellers. However, Amazon will keep shoppers’ contact information private. Rather than showing brands the email addresses and engagement for specific contacts, this tool will only show companies how many emails will send and their aggregated performance metrics.
Kaspien tested the service, and we’ve published our preliminary results. We had some interesting learnings.
Amazon Affiliate Program
The Amazon Affiliate Program, also called “Amazon Associates,” is one of the largest affiliate programs online, allowing content creators, publishers, and bloggers the opportunity to monetize their content. After signing up for the free program, creators receive links they can publish and promote to their followers. When a sale is made through their individualized link, the affiliates may receive a commission up to 10% from qualifying purchases and programs, depending upon product category.
Amazon Attribution Program
Digital marketers have always struggled with attributing sales to their off-Amazon marketing efforts, so the announcement of the Amazon Attribution Program beta was like Christmas for US Amazon sellers. Very similar to building unique campaign tags and URLs for Google Analytics tracking, sellers can now provide unique tags to social media posts, their influencers, and any other off-Amazon digital marketing strategies. Advertisements will receive the attribution if the purchase happens within the 14-day window. If multiple advertisements are engaged by a shopper, only the final ad will be credited. This program is necessary for the data-driven marketer, enabling more strategic adjustments to services and budget.
Amazon Live
This free US-only service allows brands to broadcast live or live-like videos to Amazon consumers. These livestreams can showcase product usage, features, or act almost like an infomercial on the Amazon marketplace. These videos will display on the Amazon Live page and beyond. We’ve even seen livestreams appear in competing product listings. To get the most out of your Amazon Live efforts, it’s best to pair them with promo codes since it provides a clear CTA. And the best part? Amazon Live is currently free.
Brand Dashboard
The Brand Dashboard was one of the more exciting releases in 2019 for registered brands. This dashboard offers a variety of insights that helps brands keep tabs on their brand’s health, monitor new reviews, and check the quality of newly launched ASINs. The main dashboard provides a good snapshot of performance rates as well as conversion and traffic recommendations. The snapshot includes many valuable metrics you may have already been monitoring, but the ability to view them all in one convenient place can help brands better understand the overall state of their Amazon business. Price competitiveness, detail page completion rates, and search terms optimizations are just a few of the metrics hosted on this page.
Brand Analytics
Possibly the best tool Amazon has provided for researching search terms, this reporting platform gives you insight into how your products compare to others in the market. Compare your products to top competitors, see top-performing search terms across the entire channel, or dig into the demographics of your customer base during any given time period. The competitive intelligence offered in this reporting is like none other. This free tool empowers brands to make strategic decisions with their search term and marketing strategies. Just keep in mind that there is a 3-4 day lag in the reported data.
Video Uploads
Videos have been available in the listing media gallery for quite some time, but how to get videos there was an unsolved mystery. Unless you were a large, reputable brand or had a special contact with Amazon, you were out of luck. Amazon now offers a Video Upload Manager under the Inventory tab in seller central. Videos submitted through here must be a .mp4 or .mov format under 500MB and cannot include any website URLs or other marketing materials. When you upload, you must submit a video title, related ASINs, and a video thumbnail. Once submitted, Amazon will review, and it could take up to 72 hours before publishing. Additionally, if your media gallery has more than six images, we’ve seen videos replace the sixth media gallery slot.
Brand Stores
Amazon Brand Stores allow brand owners to create a customized landing page within the Amazon marketplace. It looks like a branded website within Amazon and can be customized with your own images, videos, product listing links, and much more. You can even create a navigation bar to improve the consumer’s experience as they browse through your catalog by category, product line, or in whatever structure makes the most sense for your catalog. Amazon provides a handful of store metrics like number of visitors, views, top performing pages, and any sales that were attributed to the store. Your Amazon store will also have a custom URL that you can use for inbound marketing efforts, and it can work very well with the Amazon Attribution program in helping determine where traffic is coming from.
A+ Content Manager
Registered brands have access to the A+ Content Manager, formerly called Enhanced Brand Content in Seller Central and A+ Detail Pages in Vendor Central. A+ Content is the section of the Amazon listing that appears in either the Product Description (Seller Central) or the From the Manufacturer (Vendor Central) areas of the listing. It is an opportunity for brands to utilize additional image assets and formatted content to help persuade consumers to make their buying decision. Amazon makes claims that A+ Content will improve conversion rate by up to 11%. This is a great opportunity for higher priced items where consumers will need more convincing, or for very technical products that need a lot of details explained.
Brand Registry is an Obvious Choice
I think we can all agree the Amazon marketplace is such an incredible opportunity for brands and manufacturers around the world, but if you aren’t being protective and proactive with your brand, it can also be detrimental. Adapting to the new “normal” in commerce means you will be selling on Amazon, and if you don’t set yourself up for success with Amazon’s Brand Registry program, you could be setting yourself up for failure. Get a trademark, register your brand, and take advantage of these tools to perfect your brand integrity and watch your customer retention and sales grow.
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Jennifer has spent the last 6+ years at Kaspien learning the ins and outs of the Amazon search engine. She created and led Kaspien's SEO team during this time. In her current role, Jenn provides marketing support of all types for critical initiatives.
