“I find dealing with Amazon brutal.” That’s the conclusion of one Amazon seller who’s just found themselves suspended due to an IP rights claim from a competing merchant.
The story appears to be, our seller were happily sourcing and selling a product. Seller two comes along and starts selling the same product and decide to register a trademark for the sticker of the part number.
Our seller is then suspended for infringing seller two’s IP rights, they complain to Amazon, get no where, and only when both our seller and the manufacturer jointly threatened legal action to seller two was the complaint to Amazon withdrawn.
That leaves our seller desperately trying to justify to Amazon why they should be allowed to sell again and what steps they’ll put in place to avoid infringing any trumped up dodgy IP claims in the future. Oh and they’ve lost some £25k of sales, got stock tied up in FBA and another pallet of stock waiting to ship to FBA when Amazon start talking to them again.
Our seller told us “It’s not normal for me ever to praise eBay, but in the same situation they just deleted the listing and everyone got on with the life“. This does appear to be a problem with Amazon… that they’ll simply chop you off at the knees and suspend you for the slightest infraction. There’s no investigation or easy appeals process and your livelihood can disappear in seconds.
It’s also somewhat disheartening to realise another seller can so easily apply for a trademark for a product that they don’t own the rights to and then use that IP to kill off all their competition.
So how do you protect yourself against something like this? Is there any easy way to ensure someone can’t destroy your income by registering a trademark for products manufactured by someone else? Any tips and advice you have would be most welcome.
8 Responses
amazon is a giant speaking another language compared to ebay , you have to think like a amazon robot and bow down all the way to there rules , i hate it but most of my business is on amazon and maybe that what makes amazon successful , they only let ebay (top rated) sellers sell on there website
in the case of this seller , i admit they are ruthless but like i said they are robots
amazon are protecting a brand , ebay has lost its brand years ago and is seen as a dodgy flea market
Ebay is still best because they are, it may be full of fakes and simple frauds but your fully protected and most of the time you can get help if your a seller
Whilst I can agree that hijacking someone’s page is wrong as in the case of a private labelled they have put a lot of work in to managing there brand and building traffic to there listing, I don’t agree with idiots who change the brand or re patent inorder to chase others off in fact this should be easy for Amazon to fix surely they can see who originally created the listing
Well I was the account holder in question in this case that had the account suspended.
Amazon dealt with this terribly , I only had my account reopened yesterday whilst I had done nothing wrong what so ever.
From radio silence to generic reply emails to queries from start to finish it was a disaster .
I had mails from the Manufacturer , to the other seller ( complainant in this case) saying it was a mistake and still not a thing was done to help by Amazon , even when they realised I was not in the wrong.