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Last updated on: September 1, 2023
Businesses that prioritize their presence on Amazon are often able to generate wide-ranging online success and reach millions of potential consumers. Unfortunately, your businessâs presence on Amazon can be undermined by other unauthorized Amazon sellers that sell your products at lower prices.
There are around 9.7 million sellers on Amazon worldwide. The majority of these will be legitimate. However, you may occasionally come across unauthorized sellers that you will want to remove from your Amazon listing before they damage your brand and your customer relationships. So, how can you start taking down these sellers?
In this blog, you will learn in detail how to remove a seller from your Amazon listing. Here are a few of the key topics we will be focussing on to help you navigate the process:Â
Your businessâs ability to rank highly on Amazon and attract new customers on the marketplace is key in determining the overall success of your brand online. If anything or anyone is hindering your capacity to operate on Amazon then you should quickly act to overcome this problem.
Ultimately, you should remove an unauthorized seller from your Amazon listing if they are harming your online presence. If you notice a drop in sales or negative customer reviews that seem unconnected to your interactions with consumers, you must act fast before the damage to your brand becomes permanent.
Unauthorized sellers are third-party resellers or distributors that sell products on Amazon without authorization from the brand that owns those products. These resellers come in all shapes and sizes. Some have the potential to significantly disrupt your business on Amazon while others will do little harm at all if managed correctly.
For example, individual one-off sellers that have little experience with Buy Box mechanics or Fulfillment by Amazon procedures (FBA) will usually not impact your presence on Amazon. Whereas, in areas like the toy industry, the much bigger problem is when organized groups of counterfeiters or skilled arbitrage sellers start undercutting your sales on Amazon.
Ultimately, if you donât remove unauthorized sellers from your Amazon listing, they have the potential to harm your brand in two key ways:
1. Unauthorized sellers will undercut your sales on Amazon by selling at lower prices. Experienced resellers will take advantage of your minimum advertised price (MAP) and seek to win the âFeatured Offerâ (formerly the Amazon Buy Box). Then, when shoppers look for the best deal on Amazon they will buy from the unauthorized seller instead. Â
2. Unauthorized sellers will also undermine your relationship with customers and impact your reputation. Consumers will associate resellers that deliver poor quality products, inadequate shopping experiences, and bad customer service, with your brand. This may result in negative reviews on your product listings and consumers may start to avoid interacting with your brand.Â
To begin to tackle the issue of unauthorized sellers on Amazon you must first learn how to identify these sellers. Here are a few manual steps you can take to help you find unauthorized sellers and protect your businessâs products on Amazon.
One of the simplest first steps you can take is to search for your products on Amazon to see whether there are any sellers that you do not recognize. Then to confirm whether they are unauthorized Amazon sellers you can do a test purchase.
This is a common and essential practice that will help you verify the authenticity of the product and gather evidence. You will be able to determine whether the product has any material differences to your own, allowing you to distinguish between gray market goods and counterfeit products.
The downside to this method is that it can be slow, costly, and inefficient especially if you are a large organization with a wide range of products on Amazon.Â
Customer reviews and feedback can often be a valuable source of information on unauthorized sellers. Descriptions of suspicious interactions, sub-par products, and strange delivery practices may help you identify sellers operating on Amazon without your permission. By engaging with customers on Amazon you will also be able to help them avoid interacting with unauthorized sellers in the future.
Amazon has created brand protection programs like Amazon Transparency Program and Project Zero to give businesses tools to identify and stop counterfeiters. For example, your brand can use Transparency to verify product authenticity and engage with Amazon customers post-purchase. This will help you to identify when and where your products are being sold by unauthorized sellers on Amazon.
Amazon has selling policies and a seller code of conduct. If you believe that a seller has violated these policies then you can seek to remove them from your Amazon listing through Amazonâs internal reporting process.
1. Gather evidence
The first step in removing unauthorized sellers is to gather as much pertinent evidence as possible that shows they have violated Amazonâs policies. Record product descriptions, names, prices, ASINs, and reviews that demonstrate how the seller has acted improperly. The more information you gather at the beginning of the process the easier it will be to fill in complaint forms later on.Â
2. Complete Amazonâs report form
Through Amazonâs Seller Central portal head over to their âReport a Violationâ page. Here you will need to select the kind of violation (e.g. copyright infringement).
You will also need to provide the applicable ASIN/ISBN as well as other information about the seller. Here’s where you need to be thorough and accurate because this is the information that will determine whether Amazon will act to remove the listing.
3. Submit your report
Once you have included an explanation of the violation and any supporting documentation (e.g. order IDs, receipts, or related correspondence), you can then submit your report and wait for a response.
Amazon support will usually respond to your request within 24 hours. However, they will then take a longer time to assess the case. Typically, Amazon may take up to 30 days to remove a sellerâs listing. Then it can take up to 90 days for Amazon to remove the account of an unauthorized seller. The amount of time it actually takes will depend on any issues or pending transactions linked to the account.
If Amazon determines that there has been no infringement they will not remove the listing. In such cases, your next best option is to engage a service that specializes in removing unauthorized listings and suspicious accounts from online marketplaces.Â
So, if you can start to remove sellers from your Amazon listing on your own, why is it worth getting a dedicated seller removal service? Ultimately, it comes down to time and money.
Not every case will be straightforward. Some unauthorized sellers will be deceptive and persistent. It will be inefficient to pursue large-scale issues on Amazon through their manual internal infringement reporting process. If you rely on your own resources you will be forced into a whack-a-mole approach to brand protection, as you try to contend with bad actors popping everywhere.Â
Unauthorized sellers that change their names or product images and persistently target your brand can be a nightmare to deal with on your own. Thatâs why many businesses today are now turning to experienced, tech-driven seller removal services.
Our Amazon Brand Protection Service is a practical and effective solution to the issue of unauthorized sellers. In 2022 alone, we enforced over 409,000 listings on Amazon, helping hundreds of brands protect their products and customers on the biggest online marketplace. Hereâs how it works:
We identify unauthorized sellers on Amazon via our bot-powered search and use image recognition technology to scan photos. This helps us identify unauthorized sellers as soon as they pop up on Amazon.
Over time, our machine learning program suggests new rules and keyword opportunities enabling us to expand our detection net and target sellers more effectively.
Then we move to take down unauthorized sellers that may be harming your brand. You can use our image cards to manually validate incidents or you can set up rules that allow us to automatically enforce against sellers as soon as they appear. To ensure we tackle cases in the best order you can also prioritize the way we deal with infringements with our high-risk shortlist.
To ensure you can continue to improve the way you approach the problem of unauthorized sellers on Amazon, we allow you to see the impact of your brand protection actions.
With performance dashboards, output reports, and data extraction you will have all the information you need to understand the way Red Points can help you and how you can protect your brand on Amazon from unauthorized sellers.Â
With 63% of online consumers starting their search for new products on Amazon, the marketplace is second to none which makes it a vital space for any brands that want to succeed online. You canât afford to allow unauthorized sellers to cut into your profits on Amazon and disrupt your ability to reach customers.Â
Amazonâs Brand Protection Programs, like Transparency and Project Zero, will help you take the first steps to defend your product listings but that´s not enough. If you are experiencing a high volume of unauthorized sellers on Amazon you should look to dedicated seller removal services that will help your business identify and take down sellers with efficiency and precision on a large scale.Â
To learn more about how Red Points can help you remove a seller from your Amazon listing, request a demo here.
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