How to gate your brand on Amazon

Last updated on: May 5, 2023

Amazon is the biggest online marketplace in the world, shipping close to 1.6 million packages each day. In 2022, third parties accounted for 59% of all Amazon’s marketplace sales. Counterfeiters and scammers are constantly finding new ways to steal branded content online and pass it off as their own. If you want to protect your brand online, you have to make sure that you are safeguarding it from potential counterfeiting on Amazon. 

So, what steps can you take to protect your brand on Amazon? Does Amazon have its own systems of protection that you can use? Are there external solutions to help your brand operate safely on Amazon? 

In this blog, we’ll be exploring how to gate your brand on Amazon by touching on a number of topics, including: 

• How to gate your brand on Amazon
• Why gating your brand on Amazon is important
• How Red Points’ Amazon brand protection services can benefit businesses

How to gate your brand on Amazon

One of the easiest and most reliable ways to protect your brand on Amazon is by registering and launching your brand within Amazon’s brand protection system. This process is called gating. Amazon brand gating helps to stop unauthorized sales of counterfeits and knockoffs. Businesses can “gate” their presence on Amazon, thereby limiting the number of sellers for their products and requiring resellers to obtain permission before selling their products.  

Here is a step-by-step guide to follow if you want to know how to gate your brand:

Step 1)

First, you will want to enroll in the Amazon Brand Registry. Head over to Amazon’s Brand Services page. 

Step 2)

Prepare all the information you may need and click on ‘Begin’. 

Step 3)

Confirm your business location and type and provide further business information. 

Step 4)

Then provide your seller information and confirm billing information. 

Step 5)

You will then have to verify all the details you have provided and confirm your intention to join the brand registry program.

Step 6)

Once you have joined the brand registry program, you will need to contact Amazon’s seller support. You will need to send them all the required information about your brand, which will include a list of Amazon Standard Identification Numbers (ASINs). Amazon will then brand gate all of these ASINs, ensuring that your branded products are protected from counterfeiters. 

Step 7)

If you wish you can also provide Amazon with a list of authorized third-party sellers. If you do, third-party sellers will still need to supply written permission or an invoice when they apply to sell one of your branded products. 

Why gating your brand on Amazon is important

Unauthorized resellers and the gray market have the potential to impact your brand’s revenue, reputation, and relationships with customers.

• Impact on revenue

Amazon is the most popular online marketplace in the world. It is a key center of opportunity for any business selling products or services online. 

By requiring resellers of your products to show that they are authorized to do so, you will limit the number of counterfeiters operating on Amazon. This will lessen the revenue lost to knock-off and counterfeit products. 

After gating your brand you will quickly be able to quantify the economic impact of your decision. You will notice that less revenue is going missing and fewer counterfeiters are profiting from stealing your products. 

• Impact on reputation

Gating your brand on Amazon will also help to protect your reputation. Unauthorized sellers have the ability to damage your brand by selling inferior versions of your product. This will diminish the image of your brand in the marketplace and make your business seem unprofessional. 

Unlike revenue, brand reputation is an elusive quality that is sometimes hard to properly measure. However, over time, brands will be able to recognize the trajectory of their reputation within the industry. If your reputation is stagnant, or worse, slowly degrading, then you will be able to tackle this issue by protecting your products and intellectual property (IP) by gating your brand on Amazon. 

• Impact on customer relationship & trust

Lastly, gating your brand on Amazon will also help to improve your relationship with customers and the trust they have in your business. Gating ensures that only legitimate or authorized versions of your products are sold on Amazon. If customers can shop on Amazon and be certain that they are buying your legitimate products they will trust your business. 

Over time, this trust can develop into a positive relationship where the customer will expect quality and the business will expect loyalty. Without gating, this relationship can be disrupted by counterfeiters who seek to take advantage of the trust the business has built. With gating, brands can maximize the value of their intellectual property (IP) by developing solid customer relationships based on trust. 

How Red Points’ Amazon brand protection services can benefit businesses

Red Points’ Amazon Brand Protection Services can also be used to safeguard your products, IP and brand. The service works to automatically find and remove infringements on Amazon’s marketplace via 3 simple steps: 

• Detect

Our bot-powered search scans throughout Amazon’s marketplace to detect potential online infringements every hour. Through smart image recognition technology, we will scan Amazon listings’ photos to detect any potential intellectual property infringement. 

Our detection system will then record links associated with each infringement and infringer, collecting them into a log that you can review within Red Points’ platform. 

• Validate

You will then be able to review and validate the log of potential infringements we’ve detected to confirm whether or not they are infringing your intellectual property (IP) rights. While this is the only manual step in our process that requires your action, this validation process can be automated for certain infringements based on rules that you design using our “smart rules”. 

Over time, by confirming what is and is not an infringement of your IP, not only does our machine-learning algorithm become more and more precise when it comes to identifying infringements. This means that over time the validation process will become quicker, but it allows you to take down infringers as fast as possible!

• Enforce

While gating your brand will provide you with a first line of defense, our enforcement process is the most proactive way to robustly safeguard your products from high-risk infringers. Once you have validated a case of infringement on our platform, we immediately enforce your IP rights on your behalf by sending removal and takedown requests to the infringer. 

You will have total control over this process. Ultimately, this will ensure that you can pursue and take down the scammers who are having the largest impact on your brand. 

After enforcement, our brand protection service will enable you to measure the impact of your actions via performance dashboards and insightful reports. You can also export data or use our API to inform your future decisions with valuable information. 

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What’s Next

Protecting your brand in the world’s biggest marketplace is vital. It is a step that any business must take if they want to safeguard their brand online. Thousands of counterfeiters and scammers make their money by taking advantage of vulnerable businesses that haven’t taken the proper steps to keep their brand and IP safe. Without protection, you risk both your revenue and your reputation. 

One of the simplest ways to protect your brand and your products is by signing up to Amazon’s Brand Registry and gating your products. Beyond gating your brand on Amazon, you can upgrade your business by using Red Points’ Amazon Brand Protection Services. 
With our modern, proactive solution you will protect your products and IP on Amazon while also learning in detail how to comprehensively safeguard your brand online. If you want to learn more about how Red Points’ Amazon Brand Protection Solution can help your business, sign up for a demo today.