Amazon Brand Registry Explained

Welcome to the bring your product idea to life podcast. This is the podcast for you if you're getting started selling products or if you'd like to create your own product to sell.

I'm Vicki Weinberg, a product creation coach and Amazon expert. Every week I share friendly practical advice.

As well as inspirational stories from small businesses.

Let's get started.

Hello and welcome to another Tuesday Amazon made Easy episode.

Today I'd like to talk to you about Brand Registry because when I start.

Working with a new brand, particularly one we're about to get started on Amazon. So when I'm working on a launch package, one of the first questions I always ask is, do you have a registered trademark?

Reason being if you do have that, you can apply for Amazon Brand Registry and I think it is something that worth every Amazon seller doing. So in this episode I'm going to talk to you about what Amazon Brand Registry is, how you register and why. I think it's definitely worth considering.

So let's start with what Brand Registry is. So Amazon Brand Registry does a couple of things.

It helps you protect your intellectual property on Amazon, it helps you manage your listings, it helps you grow your business by giving you access to lots of other tools, and it's all for free. So I think that's the bit that often surprises people.

It doesn't cost you anything to have Brand Registry, so I think that's worth knowing at the outset. So in terms of how to register for it, first of all you need to be eligible.

And to be eligible for Brand Registry you must either have an active registered trademark in the country which you wish to enrol, or you need to have a pending trademark. And the pending trademark can be either filed via the Amazon IP accelerator or via different trademark offices.

So there were country specific requirements. But in the uk having a pending trademark is enough to apply for Brand Registry.

And the trademark that you have for your brand needs to be either a word mark or a design mark.

So I'm not an expert in this, but to the best of my knowledge a word mark is like a text based mark, or a design mark is an image based mark, but it does have words, letters or numbers in it. So that is all you need to apply.

If you don't yet have a registered or pending trademark for your brand, but you are looking to start selling on Amazon, I actually would suggest perhaps considering registering partly so that you can use Brand Registry and also partly to prevent problems coming up in future. Because while there is a cost of course for the trademark application, I believe it's something like £130. Don't quote me on that.

I should have looked that up, shouldn't I? I can't remember exactly how much it is, but it's not a huge amount of money.

But if you're going to be selling on Amazon, it does give you quite a lot. So very briefly, what it gives you is full control over your listings or more control over your listings, let's say.

So it makes it easier to report violations. So let's say that somebody else decides to list your product on Amazon.

Maybe you, your product is available via somewhere else, maybe you're selling into stores or you're selling via a wholesaler, or you've got someone managing your wholesale business for you and they decide to put your product on Amazon without your consent and put up whatever text and images they like. And believe me, this does happen even and it sometimes surprises people that it happens.

If you have Brand Registry, you're able to say, well hang on, we're the owners of this brand, we didn't give permission for this, we need this taken down.

Of course you can do this without having Brand Registry, but if you have it, it honestly does make it a lot easier and they do take you a more seriously. You also get a content sponsored brands, you can have a store on Amazon and you can use Amazon Vine.

And in just a moment I'm going to take you through each of those things and explain briefly what they are. But first of all, I'm going to come back to what I said a moment ago about why I think it's important to think about registering brand registry.

And if that means getting a trademark, still doing it, and that is that when you set up a product listing on Amazon, one of the things you need to give is a brand name.

If you set up your products on Amazon with a brand name and then you decide, oh, actually I'm going to register this as a trademark and you go and do that and perhaps the trademark you want isn't available, so you have to go for something slightly different. That brand name then may not match the brand name that you originally set up on your Amazon listings.

And this can then cause some issues if they don't align.

I mean, to give you a really small example, I was working with a brand recently and and they set up their product listings using their brand name but in lowercase. So a capital, the beginning and then the rest lowercase.

But the trademark that they have for that brand name, and by the way, it's the same letters, is all in capitals.

So when they had the brand registry in place and then we were then trying to link their existing product listings to that brand so we could set up A plus content and the store and everything else. We came into big problems because Amazon was saying, well, hang on, that's not an exact match.

And believe me, I'm very tenacious and I wasn't letting this one go. And I did eventually get Amazon to accept okay is actually the exact same word, it's just different casing and get this all fixed.

But it did take, I want to say, at least a week, possibly even two of me constantly going back and forth, back and forth with all the proof that you could possibly need that these were products that should go under this brand. And as much as that might sound ridiculous, it was ridiculous. This kind of thing and does happen.

So I would say if you are looking to start on Amazon now and you don't have a registered trademark and you think you might have registered trademark and maybe you just don't want to pay for that right now, think about what that registered trademark will be. Maybe look and see whether it's going to be available and make sure that's the name you use on your Amazon product listings.

But if at all possible, have the registered or pending trademark when you get set up so you know for sure they're going to match because if they don't, what you're then left with. So say you've been selling on Amazon for two years and then you decide, okay, I'm going to register a trademark and go for Brand Registry.

If the brand name you've been using on your listings doesn't align with the one that you then set up in Brand Registry, you then have to set all your product listings up again from scratch. This means you need new barcodes because you can't reuse a barcode on Amazon. This means that any product reviews that you've had are gone.

This means that any sales history is gone. You're effectively starting from scratch and that is not a good place to be.

So please, please, please, if you take nothing else from this episode, take away the fact that if you are just getting started on Amazon now, having a trademark and using that trademark as your brand name on Amazon will really pay off in the future. Please, please, please do that.

So I'm going to very quickly now talk you through the other things I mentioned that you get as part of Brand Registry, which as I said is free.

So the first thing you get is a content and what this is is additional text, images, graphics, videos, etcetera comparison tables, which is something I absolutely love, that you can have on the bottom of your product listing. So in the old days on Amazon, if that's the right way of saying it, your product description was like a little bit of text.

And if you were fancy, you could use a little bit of HTML to put it in paragraphs, maybe bold some bits, or put in bullet points. And that was the extent of what you could do.

But now you'll probably see on a lot, I don't know the percentage actually of brands that use a content, but you will see on a lot of product listings on Amazon.

Now, when you scroll down and you see this, probably, you probably notice this more on your deck, on your desktop, there are big graphics and there's additional text and there's just lots of. There's just lots more information about the product and perhaps the brand as well.

According to Amazon, using A Plus content can increase sales by up to 8%. I don't know where they got that stat from. I don't know if that's correct, but I genuinely think whether that's the right percentage or not.

I do think using A plus content can help increase sales because it just gives you more space to talk about your products and your brand. And I think that is always, always a good thing. I've spoken in previous episodes about the fact that I think more is good, actually.

Not to the point of repetition, but having all the information someone might need in order to decide to purchase your product is really, really good. And if you have a content, you can have that.

You can also, if you have a content, run a B tests on the content to see which titles, which images drive the most sales. I think that's really good for those of you who are, who are into that. You can also add a brand story across all of your listings.

So this is something that's brand specific and this is a really good way, telling customers a bit more about your brand and what you stand for. I just think it's great. So the next thing you can have is sponsored brands. So sponsored brands is a form of advertising.

So on Amazon, there's something called sponsored products, which is where you can set up campaigns to drive traffic towards your listings.

So sponsored brands is where the advert uses either images or sometimes a video to help drive traffic either to your brand store, which we'll talk about in a minute, or a specific product detail page. And they're given a bit more prominence than other ads. They're usually right at the top, like a banner, right at the Top of the search results.

If you search for something on Amazon and you see a big banner come up the top and it's usually got a brand logo and maybe a couple of products in there. Yeah. Sometimes a video, sometimes an image that is a sponsored brand ad.

Because if you don't have brand registry, then the ads that you get are the ones that come up below that. You know, you see the list of search results and it will say sponsored, sponsored on some of them. So that's a standard ad.

I'll be honest though, sponsored brands are harder in my experience to get working perhaps, I think that's fair to say than a sponsored product. But they can be good. So especially if you have a range of products that someone might be interested in.

So for example, I've worked with hair care brands and you might do an ad that shows all of the products for curly hair, for example.

So rather than a customer just seeing these individual things coming up in the results, they can see, oh, this brand does a range for curly hair or fine hair or whatever it is. So they can, they definitely can work. But they, I do think they need a little bit of thought.

But as I say, one really good thing about them is they're very visible. So that is always an advantage. You can also, if you are signed up for brand registry, have a store. So this is basically almost like a mini website.

You've possibly seen one of these on Amazon. If you click on, if you look at an Amazon product listing and you click on the brand name under the title, always says the brand.

If that, if that brand is registered with brand registry and they've set up a store, it will take you there when you click on the brand name, which is really, really good because if you don't have brand registry or you have brand Registry, you don't have a store set up.

What you can often find is when you click on that brand name, you get some products from that brand, but you also get load that aren't just like random products in the same category. Whereas I think what's really nice about a store is it shows you everything you sell in one place.

Particularly if you sell a range, particularly if you sell different types of products. I think it's really good because a store isn't just a sort of a page. It used to be, but now you can have sub pages.

So if you sell different categories of products, for example, even if, even if you're selling across different Amazon categories. So let's say you're selling, you sell books, but you also sell I don't know, yoga products and then books about yoga as an example.

All those products can be in your store, but you could have different pages. You have a page of books and a page for yoga gear, for example.

It also gives you a bit more space to talk about your brand because again, I think that is really important, particularly on Amazon, which can be a bit faceless compared to your website.

This is, you know, you can use all your branding, you can talk more about your brand, your brand values, why people might consider buying from you versus someone else, and you can just put a lot more information.

So as some examples, I've worked with food brands where we've had a page on the store showing the different ways customers have used their ingredients in different recipes. That's really nice. I've worked with a hair brand where we've shown before and after pictures from different products.

And of course, a lot of this can be on your product listing as well. But you only have so much space. You have nine images.

And even if you're using brand registry, a content, sorry, there's still, you know, a limited amount of space that you have.

But on the store, this is a good place for you to put everything that would be useful to a customer that you want to get across but you don't have room for on your product listing. So I think it's great. And also everything that I've spoken about.

So for example, you're showing before and after of hair, it all links through to product pages as well. So you can add links all over your store to the various product pages that people can buy your products directly from the store. I think that's great.

And then the final thing that you have access to is Amazon Vine. So vine is a program that helps generate customer reviews from Amazon trusted reviewers.

I don't know what it takes to be an Amazon trusted reviewer, but I'm led to believe that people who, I guess, buy a lot on Amazon and leave a lot of reviews on Amazon, particularly ones that people mark as useful, can get invited to be a Vine reviewer. And what it means is that you enroll a product or products in vine and you provide free units to reviewers.

And then the people Amazon will then say to their reviewers, we've got X amount of these. Who would like one? People apply, they get one for free, and then they leave you a review.

And this can be a really nice way to get some initial reviews on your products because we'll speak more about this in other episodes and I will definitely come back to vine in more detail. But it can be really hard to get started, especially if you're in a category where everyone else has got reviews and you've got none.

Which I mean is the case when you get started. But vine can be a really nice way to get some reviews quickly. It does show us a Vine review. So I will say that. So it's very transparent.

People can see that you've given something for free to get that review. But I still don't think that matters.

You're not necessarily going to get all five star reviews either from giving this divine that's a good or a bad thing, depending on your point of view. However, if you are confident that you've got a really good product and I'm sure you've got a really good product, I think it can be worth doing.

I should point out there is a cost for everything I've spoken about. The store is obviously free. The A content is free. Sponsored brands. Well obviously you have to put some advertising budget into that.

But vine there is a cost for I think it's one to two units. There's no cost. That's really not very many if you're going to get two, you know, two reviews is better than no reviews.

But actually if you are able to, I would suggest giving a higher amount of units and paying the cost. But as I said, I'm going to do a much more detailed episode just on vine in a couple of weeks as well for those of you who'd find that interesting.

So thank you so much for listening to this Amazon Made Easy episode. I really hope you're enjoying them. Please tell me if you are. Please tell me if you're not.

And if you have a question or a topic you'd like me to cover in a future episode, you can email me as always on vikiickiewinberg.com.

Thank you so much for listening right to the end of this episode.

Do remember that you can get the full back catalogue and lots of free resources on my website, vickyweinberg.com Please do remember to rate and review this episode if you've enjoyed it, and also share it with a friend who you think might find it useful. Thank you again and see you next week.