In spite of being a developing country, India has shown immense growth in the e-commerce sector. Amazon is one such e-commerce site which is widely known and as any other e-commerce business, it allows sellers to sell their products on their website. Since there are thousands of sellers on Amazon, there was a need of protecting brand name/trademark of sellers in order to prevent infringement of intellectual property. Considering the necessity, Amazon started something called Amazon Brand Registry, an exclusive program designed for the sellers so that they can manage their brand, products, product details on their website through their brand name/trademark.

Registering your brand/trademark with the Amazon Brand Registry:

As a prerequisite, the trademark should have registered in order to register the same on Amazon Brand Registry. Registration of trademarks is vital to any business as it provides the legal right to business name to the owner which facilitate protection of trademarks from infringement. Additionally, a brand name or trademark may be a device, logo, label, sound or a word mark, however, for the time being, Amazon Brand Registry only accepts trademark registrations registered as a Word trademark for the brand registry approval process. The brand name may have logo or label in addition to wordmark.

Benefits of registering a trademark with Amazon Brand Registry:

  • It allows sellers to list their products with the brand name using Amazon-issued product IDs [Global Catalog Identifier (GCID)] without buying standard product identifiers such as UPCs or EANs.
  • Enhanced control over brand content, product detail pages such as titles, descriptions, details, images and other attributes which maximize chances to best represent the products online under seller’s ownership.
  • Speedier removal of hijackers and counterfeit products.
  • Tools to search for infringing brand name/trademark and thereby prevent intellectual property rights violations.

Any seller on Amazon can register on Amazon Brand Registry. It is an innovative measure to facilitate the sales on Amazon as well as provide protection to the brand name/trademark owner. Amazon Brand Registry allows proprietor of trademarks to protect their mark specifically on e-commerce and helps in growing businesses.

Also, check our post on e-commerce and intellectual property.