Introduction
If your brand is gaining traction on Amazon, it's only a matter of time before someone tries to profit from it. Hijackers, counterfeiters, and unauthorized resellers don't wait - and neither should your protection system. Here's how Brand Registry, MAP enforcement, and IP tools work together to keep your listings, pricing, and reputation intact.
The Short Answer
Amazon Brand protection is when you can make a stop on sellers that are trying to hijack your listings, undercut your prices and sell counterfeits under your name. It all comes to three things: Brand Registry, MAP enforcement and IP tools like Project Zero and Transparency.
What usually happens when a brand starts to gain traction on Amazon is hijackers getting attached to the listing within weeks. When this happens, they drop the price, and tank the reviews with low-quality units. At this point, what happens next depends entirely on whether the brand has a protection system which is built in advance.
Brand Registry is what gives you control over your product pages, and an ability to report any violations. MAP enforcement sets a minimum advertised price across all your resellers, and the IP tools let you remove counterfeits or block them before they reach a customer.
In this guide, we break down each layer, how to set it up, and when to act.
What Amazon Brand Protection Actually Covers
The Three Layers Most Brands Are Missing
When you start selling on Amazon and when you start gaining traction, you are becoming a target, as hijackers will attach themselves to your listing.
This is why it's important to follow the three levels of brand protection. In this way, you will avoid lower prices than your brand has, and counterfeit units that will make your reviews tank, and lose the customers’ trust, and it starts with:
- Layer One (Brand Registry): The Brand Registry is your identity on the platform. In it, you have full control over your product's pages, marketing tools, and it provides you with the ability to report any type of violation.
- Layer Two (MAP enforcement): The MAP enforcement is a Minimum Advertising Price which you have to set up yourself across all the channels you're selling through, so you can protect your margins.
- Layer Three (IP and Counterfeit Protection): Sometimes fake items can appear similar to your products, so it's important to use tools like Project Zero or the Transparency program.
Protecting your brand is an "all-or-nothing" game. Without having specific counterfeit protection, you will lose sales to fakes.
This is why it's important to follow all of the steps we mentioned and implement all the three layers into one cohesive strategy.
Amazon Brand Registry: Your First Line of Defense
How to Enroll and What You Unlock
Brand Registry is the first setup you need to do on Amazon, as every other protection tool requires it.
Without the Brand Registry, you can’t access features like A+ Content, Brand Stores, or Sponsored Brands ads, and what’s most important, you can’t report any sellers that are misusing your brand.
Once you enroll in the Brand Registry program, you will get verified, and you’ll receive a trademark and your brand name on your product packaging. Also, once you get verified, you will receive access to other tools that other sellers don’t have.
Besides all these benefits, one of the most important ones is the “Report a Violation” dashboard.
Here, you can flag counterfeit products or sellers that are using your brand name without any permission. Once you have all the evidence, Amazon will review it and act on it with a removal (if there are clear violations).
Report a Violation: Using Registry’s Built-In Tools
In the Report a Violation dashboard you can submit evidence of counterfeit products or other issues that might be affecting you in any way.
To make an official report, you need to select the specific type of violation and provide the ASIN or seller ID, along with any documents you might have gathered.
Once this process is done, you can wait for their removal anywhere between 24 to 48 hours. However, for more complicated cases with insufficient evidence it might take more time.
This is why it's important to make sure all the images show clear evidence, because blurry and vague complaints can get deprioritized.
Amazon IP Accelerator: Fast-Track Your Trademark
If you still haven't filed for a registered trademark, you can do that with Amazon's IP Accelerator. There are attorneys who will file the application, and they can grant you access to the Brand Registry tools before the trademark is formally granted.
This option is especially beneficial for brands that are still new but entering the competitive category.
This is because in the competitive categories, it can take up to 18 months for a trademark to be approved, and during this most vulnerable process, you will be operating unprotected.
MAP Enforcement on Amazon: Protecting Your Price Floor
Why Amazon Doesn’t Enforce MAP for You
This feature is something that catches most brands off guard. If a seller lists the same product for a lower price, Amazon will not interfere and will not remove the listing or even warn you that someone is selling for a lower price. And that's not a gap in the system—it's Amazon’s policy. Their priority is to offer the customers the lowest price possible without protecting your margins.
MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) is the lowest price you allow anyone to sell your products, but there is one thing: MAP is your rule, and not Amazon’s, so they will not enforce it on your behalf.
To control how your products are priced on Amazon, you need to create a written MAP policy and create agreements with your resellers that state the exact rules and find a way to monitor who is selling your products and at what price.
Without having this, anyone who can get hold of your inventory can list the products for whatever price they decide.
How to Build a MAP Policy That Actually Works
A MAP policy works only if you properly set it up from the start. And to make it hold up, there are four things that you need to do before any unauthorized sellers enter the market and drop their prices to compete with yours.
Here is the process you need to follow:
- First, you need to put it in writing and share the document before every seller gets to resell your products. If they are not familiar with the rules existing, you can't expect them to be enforced.
- Second, you need to explain what happens when someone breaks those rules. Typically, what you can do if someone does that is make a warning, but if this continues, you can make them temporarily lose the ability to purchase from you.
- Third, it's important to enforce these rules everywhere, and not just on Amazon. Because if you hold resellers accountable on Amazon but ignore the same behavior on third-party websites, your policy will lose all its credibility.
- The fourth thing you need to do is back it up with a signed reseller agreement. This document will give you the right to cut off any resellers that are not obeying your rules and keep breaking them repeatedly.
One important mistake that most brands make is making the MAP policy after the pricing problems have already spiraled, so to avoid this, you need to build it before you scale your distribution.
Monitoring Tools and When to Act
You can’t fix what you are not tracking, so it’s really important to determine a way to monitor who is selling your products on Amazon and at what price.
That’s why you need to set up a routine to check your listings at least two to three times a week. Prices change often, and new sellers can appear overnight, so the faster you catch them, the less damage they can do to your margins.
When you spot a problem, it’s important how you address it. If some of your approved resellers are advertising below your MAP, you should follow the exact consequences that are outlined in your policy—first give them a warning; if it happens again, follow with suspension or permanent removal.
If an unauthorized seller shows up on your listing, you need to send them a cease-and-desist letter and ask them how they got to your product in the first place. If that specific seller doesn’t provide enough information or sells counterfeits, skip this step and go straight to filing an IP complaint through Brand Registry.
There is one thing to keep in mind: unauthorized sellers and grey-market sellers are not the same.
Unauthorized sellers are those that sell your products for a much lower price than yours, but they have gotten them through a secondary distributor. Grey-market sellers are sourcing the products from a different country where it costs less.
This is why they need two different approaches. The first one is a simple distribution issue, which can be solved by tightening your reseller agreements. But the second one may require you to take a look at how the product is priced and distributed internationally.
IP & Counterfeit Protection: Project Zero and Transparency
Project Zero: Self-Service Counterfeit Removal
Project Zero is Amazon's most powerful tool for counterfeit removal, and it's available for those that are enrolled in the Brand Registry with 99% or higher acceptance rate on IP complaints.
Once you get approved, you can enjoy the many benefits the program enables including: self-service counterfeit removal, automated protections and product serialization.
While this is a beneficial tool, Amazon monitors your use, and if your accuracy drops below the required threshold, you can lose access. This is why you should only use the tool for verifiable counterfeits.
Transparency: Serialization That Blocks Fakes at the Source
The Transparency program, on the other hand, has a different approach. The program prevents counterfeits from even entering the supply chain in the first place. Each unit that is produced has a specific transparency code, which is scanned at Amazon's fulfillment centers. Without this code, the product gets immediately rejected before it even reaches the customer. This program is best for brands that belong in the high-counterfeit-risk categories, including supplements, beauty, electronics, and others.
There is a cost for each unit, so it might not be the right fit for every product. However, if you have good margins that support the cost, it is the most reliable way to stop fakes from reaching a buyer.
When to File an IP Complaint vs. When to Use Automated Tools
Not every problem will call for the same solution, so it’s very important to know which tool to opt for.
If you notice one seller repeatedly listing fake versions of your products, that is when you should file a formal IP complaint through the Brand Registry.
If you encounter a single counterfeit listing that you want to remove, consider using Project Zero. And when you want to stop fakes from showing up in the first place, that’s when you should use the Transparency program.
When you’re dealing with actual counterfeits or trademark violations, you should be careful and only file IP complaints. If a certain seller is offering your product for a lower price than you have it advertised, that is a pricing problem and not an IP problem. So, if you file a complaint for this reason, it may backfire.
Amazon has a track record of your complaint accuracy, and if you have too many complaints rejected, it will hurt your acceptance rate for entering the Project Zero program.
The Amazon Brand Protection Stack: How the Pieces Work Together
A Step-by-Step Setup Order for New and Existing Brands
The setup order is the same whether you're launching on Amazon for the first time or adding protection to an existing catalog, and each step builds on the last; otherwise, it won't work.
1. Trademark filing or IP Accelerator. If you still don’t have a registered trademark, you need to start here, as this will give you access to Brand Registry while the application is still in process.
2. Brand Registry enrollment. When your trademark becomes active or is in the pending phase through the IP Accelerator, enroll in Brand Registry to unlock the content control and reporting tools.
3. MAP policy and reseller agreements. You need to draft your policy and clearly define what the consequences are for violations and request that all resellers sign it before they start receiving inventory.
4. Project Zero application. When you have a clean track record of IP complaints that come through the Brand Registry, you can apply for Project Zero and unlock all the self-service counterfeit removal.
5. Transparency enrollment. If you belong in a category where there has been a counterfeiting problem, make sure to add transparency serialization so you can prevent fakes from entering your supply chain.
After setting the system up once, it’s all about keeping an eye on things and enforcing the rules you already have in place.
How Olifant Digital Manages Brand Protection for Clients
At Olifant Digital, brand protection is part of how we manage your Amazon account from the start, which means we handle everything covered in this guide, from Brand Registry to MAP monitoring, IP complaints, Project Zero, and Transparency, so you don’t have to manage it on your own.
While Amazon gives you the tools, it doesn't install them for you.
That’s what we do. The difference between brands that are constantly dealing with hijackers and pricing problems and those who don’t have this issue comes down to whether someone is managing these systems behind the scenes.
One excellent example is a brand we work with called Ekster. We build and maintain a clean, protected catalog structure from the start, which prevents the common problems other brands spend months trying to fix.
If unauthorized sellers keep showing up on your listings and your prices keep dropping, a single complaint will not solve the issue; instead, you need a full system in place. So, start an Amazon brand audit, and we will show you exactly where the gaps are.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Amazon Brand Registry, and do I need it?
Amazon Brand Registry is a free program that gives you control over your product listings and access to protection and marketing tools, such as A+ Content and Brand Stores, as well as the ability to report any violations.
This is where you can report violations and unlock Sponsored Brands ads and search suppression tools. Since there is no charge, anyone who has a registered or pending trademark should enroll.
Does Amazon enforce MAP pricing?
No. Amazon doesn’t enforce Minimum Advertised Price policies. They will not remove it if another seller offers a lower price than yours. MAP enforcement is the brand owner’s responsibility, and it requires a written policy and authorized reseller agreements.
How do I remove a hijacker from my Amazon listing?
The first thing you need to do is determine what kind of seller you are dealing with. If they are selling a fake version of your product, you should go through Brand Registry or Project Zero. If the seller is selling a legit product without permission, that’s a legal and distribution issue, not an IP one.
What is Amazon Project Zero, and how do I apply?
Amazon Project Zero is one of the most advanced counterfeit programs, as it allows enrolled brands to remove counterfeit listings immediately without any further review. To qualify for this tool, your brand must be enrolled in the Brand Registry and maintain a 99% acceptance rate on previous IP complaints.
What is the Amazon Transparency program?
Amazon Transparency is a unit serialization program. Each unit that you manufacture receives a unique code that Amazon scans at its fulfillment centers, and units that don’t have this code get rejected before they can actually reach a customer.
Since there is per-unit cost, it’s best for products that have sufficient margins and well-established counterfeiting problems.
Do I need a trademark to enroll in Brand Registry?
Yes, you need a registered trademark or pending trademark application. If you still don’t have one, you can connect it with the Amazon IP Accelerator program where you will be connected with trademark attorneys who can file your application. This is the fastest way for new brands that need protection.
How long does it take to get a hijacker removed from Amazon?
Depending on the method, Project Zero allows almost instant removals for brands that are enrolled and eligible, whereas a standard IP complaint filed through Brand Registry takes anywhere between 24 to 72 hours.
Can an Amazon agency manage brand protection for me?
Yes, and for brands that have meaningful volume on Amazon, this is the most effective approach. A full service agency handles the Brand Registry, they do MAP monitoring, IP complaint filing and escalation and project enrollment for tools like Project Zero and Transparency.
The only process where a brand owner is going to be required is for involvement in legal work: trademark filing, drafting seller agreements and authorizing cease-and-desist actions.
At Olifant Digital, brand protection is integrated into our account management, and not treated as a separate workstream.
If you want a full-service Amazon agency that handles Brand Registry, MAP enforcement, IP protection, and everything in between, and can back it up with real client results, get a free marketing plan with Olifant Digital. We will audit your account and show you exactly where the gaps and opportunities are.
