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Protecting Your Brand: How to Remove Counterfeits from Amazon

Brand Protection

Your business has likely collectively spent countless hours and resources to build a strong brand presence on Amazon. However, counterfeiters will continuously undermine these efforts by listing counterfeit products and passing them off under your brand name. Not only does this hurt your bottom line, but it’s also damaging to your brand’s reputation and customer trust.

By taking the necessary steps, your business can protect your brand from counterfeiters and ensure that customers are only purchasing your legitimate products. This is crucial to step in maintaining brand reputation and boosting sales on Amazon.

In this blog post, we share a step-by-step guide to removing counterfeits from Amazon manually. We also explain the alternative approach: how you can you use Corsearch’s AI-assisted technology and experts to do away with resource-sapping manual reviews and speed up enforcement.

Step-by-step guide to removing counterfeits from Amazon manually

Step 1. Pinpoint the type of infringement on Amazon

If you’ve found a counterfeit, it’s critical to cite the relevant intellectual property rights to Amazon. That’s because the platform’s actions will vary depending on the type of infringement. Intellectual property rights are defined as legal rights that protect the ownership of artistic, literary, and other creative works.

Trademarks

A trademark is a distinctive word, logo, phrase, design, or symbol used to identify the source of goods and services. Trademark infringement is defined as a mark that looks and/or sounds like yours is used without your authorization.

Counterfeiting is one type of trademark infringement, where individuals or businesses use exact copies of registered trademarks to mislead customers and pass them off as your brand.

Lookalikes and replica products on the other hand will omit trademarks from their design and packaging; copyright, design rights, and patents can be used to enforce against these illegal products.

Copyright

Copyrights are granted to authors and creators of written and multimedia works such as books, movies, music, photographs, videogames, and artwork. Copyright infringement as the unauthorized use of a protected work.

Counterfeiters will often use your copyrighted images on their product listings to lend an aura of authenticity and dupe consumers.

Design rights

Define design rights as exclusive legal protections for the physical appearance of products. These may include 3D shapes, 2D patterns, or logos that are used to identify the brand. Depending on the type of product, design rights can be difficult to use as an enforcement mechanism. However, they can be useful to tackle lookalikes on marketplaces.

Patents

Patents protect inventions, products, or industrial processes. Obtaining a patent means you can prevent others from manufacturing, using, selling, or importing your invention into a country for up to 20 years. Patent infringement happens when someone uses your invention without permission.

Step 2. Visit the regional Report Infringement page on Amazon

First, you’ll need to log in to your Amazon account or create a new account.

Next, you’ll need to complete the Intellectual Property Report Form to notify Amazon that they must legally take action and remove the product listing and / or seller permanently.

You must complete the relevant form for the regional Amazon marketplace that the counterfeit is listed on — each region has a separate Report Infringement page which corresponds with the regional domain (.co.uk, .com, .co.in, .com.br etc.)

For example:

If the product is listed in the U.S., the URL would be: https://www.amazon.com/report/infringement
If the product is listed in Italy, the URL would be: https://www.amazon.it/report/infringement/

Quicklinks for the top 5 Amazon markets:

It is important to remember that if a counterfeit product is purchasable via multiple Amazon domains, you are required to create a report for each of these domains.

You can also use the Report Infringement page to retract a report if you have enforced in error.

Note: If your brand is enrolled in Amazon’s Brand Registry, you can opt to file a notice with the Report a Violation tool found via Seller Central. Amazon Brand Registry is a collection of tools to help brands protect both their IP and customers and to manage their listings — it’s available to brands with registered or pending trademarks.

Step 3. Declare authorization to enforce and select infringement type

The initial step involves indicating whether you are the registered owner of intellectual property rights or an authorized agent acting on behalf of the owner. The rights owner may represent an individual, a seller, or a brand.

You’ll then be asked to select the type of infringement from the ‘The primary complaint pertains to’ dropdown (copyright, trademark, patent, design right, or other concerns). To report a counterfeit product, you’ll need to select ‘Trademark concerns’ and then select ‘the product is counterfeit’ in the specific concern field.

Step 3. Provide your product information

It is essential to provide a clear explanation accompanied by evidence to support your case and ensure that the counterfeit is removed.

In order to assist Amazon in verifying that your trademarked product has been counterfeited, you are required to provide additional information about your product and brand.

You’ll need to include the following details:

The name of your brand/mark/protected element of the product.
The registered trademark number or your trademark application number.

If you wish to report infringements on multiple trademarks that you own, separate complaints must be filed for each.

Amazon also inquires whether you have conducted a test purchase of the counterfeit product to confirm its inauthenticity. While this step is optional, this information can be useful to expediate the process.

Next, there is an ‘Additional Information’ box where you can elaborate on how the product infringes on your trademark and why you require the listing to be removed swiftly.

You are then given the option to attach image links for your digital IP certificates, original product listing links, plus images to help Amazon compare between the genuine and fake versions of the product.

Step 4. Provide information on counterfeit products

In this step, you are required to enter details about the counterfeit product listed on Amazon. You have two options:

Add the counterfeit listing’s ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number)
Add the counterfeit listing’s product URLs

Once you’ve added the counterfeit products, they will be displayed in a list where you can specify the scope of infringement. If all sellers associated with the listing are offering fake products, choose ‘ASN/ISBN.’

If only certain sellers on a legitimate ASIN are involved in selling counterfeit items, choose ‘Specific sellers.’ You can then mark these sellers individually.

Step 5. Provide your contact details, submit, and wait for Amazon’s response

In this final step, you’re required to provide Amazon with your contact information, which should include your full name, company details, address, phone number, and email address. Optionally, you can include secondary contact details if available.

Keep in mind that Amazon may share these details with the seller involved in infringing on your trademark; therefore, it is advisable to include only your official phone number and email address.

Typically, Amazon will respond to infringement complaints within 1 to 3 working days. If you do not receive a response within this timeframe, you may consider resubmitting the report. If your initial complaint is rejected, you have the option to submit the counterfeit product report again, providing more comprehensive and detailed information.

As the steps above highlight, this is a lengthy process that may take time away from other important tasks. And while it is a workable for the odd counterfeit product, chances are that your brand is being constantly targeted by infringers. To remove high volumes of counterfeits and protect your critical e-commerce channels such as Amazon, you’ll need automated technology and a team of dedicated experts.

Save time by using AI and experts to tackle counterfeits at scale

Regardless of whether your focus is on social media, marketplaces, websites, app stores, or other channels, Corsearch provides comprehensive brand protection solutions that save time and deliver impact.

Say goodbye to hours of manual review time with our AI-powered platform that automatically matches features, images, and logos. Utilizing our AI-powered technology, our analysts identify and prioritize high-risk threats, then leverage platform partnerships and sophisticated tools for swift enforcement. Our platform offers real-time dashboards to help your team demonstrate the value of your program and drive broader business success.

The key distinction from other brand protection vendors? By partnering with Corsearch, you’ll witness a sustained reduction in infringement, increased engagement with your authentic brand channels, and a strong return on investment.

Our established four-step process:

1. Detect infringement

Automatically gather data at scale to identify and monitor threats using Corsearch’s cutting-edge detection capabilities. Our adaptable keyword search framework enables you to adjust search parameters and stay ahead of evolving threats and infringer behavior. Our sophisticated image search technology also allows you to find uses of your copyright images and repeat use of counterfeit images.

2. Analyze and prioritize threats

Upon detecting infringements, we employ machine learning and image matching technology to assign risk scores, enabling you to prioritize the most significant threats to your brand. For instance, you can focus on repeat infringing sellers across Amazon US.

3. Enforce and remove threats

Drive team efficiency and cost reduction with automated, human-reviewed enforcement and takedown processes, leaving infringers no time to react. Leverage Corsearch’s understanding of platform policies and procedures to enforce efficiently and at scale.

4. Report impact

Concentrate on the data, changes, and relevant trends for your brand, facilitating faster reporting and decision-making with Corsearch’s advanced analytics dashboards. Elevate reporting and analytics from operational metrics to strategic insights and empower teams to demonstrate the impact of their efforts with built-in data storytelling tools.

Speak with a brand protection expert

Harness Corsearch’s AI-powered solutions and excellent partnership with Amazon to swiftly remove counterfeits and other threats found on its marketplaces across the globe.

Corsearch is one of the few brand protection partners that is a member of Amazon’s outreach program. We are assigned a dedicated Amazon Global Relations Manager and maintain an open communication channel with the platform, enabling us to pass on brand owners’ concerns and enact proactive policies to prevent future infringement.

Speak with one of our experts to learn how you can achieve global visibility of threats across all channels and demonstrate tangible impact through our expert-led enforcement.

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Speak to one of our experts

Protecting Your Brand: How to Remove Counterfeits from Amazon