Amazon Sellers News 11/19/19 with CJ Rosenbaum: Amazon Seller IP Complaints, Related Accounts, Grey Market vs Counterfeit
Intellectual property rights complaints specifically against book sellers on Amz.
Now, selling books on Amazon is its entire own industry. We have an entire set of videos specifically for people and companies selling textbooks, novels, all sorts of literature on Amazon. You need to know the issues that face your particular business, and if you go to our YouTube channel, you will find an entire series of videos made solely for booksellers on Amazon. If you’re selling books watch out for IP complaints. Watch out for lawsuits. Watch out for letters from the O+Z Law Firm.
Related account suspensions continue to rise throughout Q4 as Black Friday approaches.
The last thing you want to do is get caught with related accounts, because both accounts, or all of your accounts, are going to go down. The easiest account to get back on is that oldest account first. What we’re starting to see is more and more when you get that oldest account back on, the subsequent accounts will come back on as well, even though it is clearly against Amazon’s terms of service. If you get the oldest account back on usually that’s it, but sometimes your newer accounts will come on as well. Also, when it comes to related accounts, Amazon has been giving more and more specific phone numbers for you to call a point person within Amazon that you can speak to about your related account problem. Now, we don’t know if this is the seller services department that was built, and is currently working with people in the UK that Amazon had told me when I was in India a couple of weeks ago they were going to launch in the United States. Maybe this is the start of something really good where Amazon sellers will be able to speak with somebody at Amazon without the fear of their account going under the stricter review of being suspended.
Maybe inauthentic.
This is when Amazon is doing its own brand policing, its own brand protection. It seems mostly geared towards drop shippers right now, but maybe inauthentic could be devastating, because it could be two, three, four, five, and boom the six one knocks you down. It could be the second or third one, you never know. If you get a maybe inauthentic, a possibly inauthentic, make sure you have invoices if at all possible, and absolutely review our articles on our blog when it comes to inauthentic suspensions, what your invoices should have on them, and what your invoices should not have on them.
Amazon booksellers restricted.
We have received a couple of calls from booksellers who have been suspended because their products were in restricted products like almost as if Amazon is restricting the content of the books, and we’re not talking about racism, we’re not talking about antisemitism, and we’re not talking about conversion therapy. We’re talking about books about terrorism. Novels addressing certain topics. So we suspect it’s a problem with Amazon’s algorithm, but you never know, and when you control such a huge, huge portion of the market controlling what people read is really, really scary, so we’re hopeful this is just a blip, and not a plan by Amazon to restrict what people can read, especially if it’s not one of these topics that most of us find terribly offensive.
What is gray market versus counterfeit?
The gray market generally pertains to products that you obtain outside the intended distribution channel of the brand. For example, if Birkenstock had decided it was not going to sell anything on Amazon, and yet sellers started doing it, those would be gray market Birkenstock shoes. It’s sellers taking products outside Birkenstock’s planned distribution, and selling them on Amazon. They’re real, they’re genuine, but the manufacturer doesn’t want them on Amazon. Counterfeit, on the other hand, are products that are just fake. They are not the real thing. They are knockoffs made at different factories with different supplies, and different resources.