Amazon Brand Protection – Branded By Amazing EP #10

Matt Clark (00:06):
Welcome to branded by amazing. This is episode number 10. And today we’re going to talk about protecting your brand on Amazon. This is Matt Clark, CEO of amazing

Mike McClary (00:15):
Mike McClary, the chief product officer of amazing.

News: Amazon Annual Report

I want to talk about a recent news story. Every year Amazon releases an annual report on what they’ve been doing to protect their sellers brands. And this past spring, they released their news report for the last year. It’s called their brand protection report and highlighted all the attempts that have been made out there for fraudulent sellers, trying to get on their platform and sell products. I mean, it’s such a big potential revenue profit maker. Then it’s only natural that all these bad actors are trying to take advantage of the platform.

Well, last year they stopped over 6 million accounts that would have been fraudulent sellers from even getting accounts created or selling products the year before it was only two and a half million. That’s more than twice as many they’re able to stop. They’re really definitely amping up their protection measures.

Mike McClary (01:02):
And probably people are trying to more important people trying to get online as well. Selling. they also started, I didn’t hear about this one, Matt, but the Amazon counterfeit crimes unit. I kind of want to get a job with Amazon and be a part of that unit, have a card that says right there, but there are no longer just stopping people and suspending them. They’re actually referring people to, you know, the police or FBI, if they feel like crimes are being committed, which also a big deterrent is you can imagine the implemented something we’ll talk a little about today called the IP accelerator.

And they also started selling showing seller business addresses, which also helped keep people who are trying to hide their business address, the real business name from selling on Amazon. And they are going to be implementing a lot of the features or they actually did start implementing a lot of the features and things that we’re going to talk about today when we get into brand registry and transparency and, and things

Matt Clark (01:51):
Like that. Yeah. It’s interesting reading about this stuff. Cause Amazon could be super annoying sometimes for people trying to sell on Amazon or us. We’re trying to teach you both to sell on Amazon. I mean, sometimes we have a nightmare of a time getting people approved for his Amazon seller central accounts. I would say like most of the time it’s fine. But every once in a while, some of these people have such a pain in the butt it’s because of this kind of thing. Cause they’re kind of trying to keep that stuff from happening.

And it is interesting too, because it’s like a lot of times it’s, you know it feels like they’re not listening and they’re not doing anything, but you can tell, I mean, they do want to clean up their platform. They don’t want these people doing bad things on there. And like we’re kind of getting today about protecting your brand. There’s a reason you want to protect your brand is to prevent people from doing bad things to it. So it’s good to hear that they are doing more and more to protect sellers.

Mike McClary (02:32):
I feel like maybe they cross that threshold where they finally feel like they get things in the control because before if they had any countries that they felt like, ah, there’s just too many bad actors from here, they wouldn’t let you solve from them. And then just a few months ago, they finally said pretty much any country now, except for seven, I don’t have the exact seven right now, but out of the 195 countries, only seven now instead of a hundred, you can no longer sell from that’s assigned to me that they have their controls in place now.

Protecting Your Brand

Matt Clark (02:56):
We want to talk about protecting brain cause some of this stuff is newer. So I’m going to be asking Mike a few questions cause he’s very familiar with this stuff. But first off, like why would you want to protect your brand at all? I mean, a big reasons are, is because if you want to build a business and you want to produce consistent sales, you don’t want people ripping off your product ripping off your brand. Also it helps add more consistently see longterm if you ever want to sell your business. So having your brand and kind of being able to not feel like doing all the marketing and all the brand building and all the product work is kind of a waste of time because then somebody can just jump in there, rip off your product, jump on your listing, rip off your brand.

Matt Clark (03:32):
So being able to prevent all that stuff from happening is the whole reason why you’d want to protect your brand. So not going to spend a ton of time on that question because it’s kind of obvious because it’s a good thing to do. Now. Maybe some things are kind of maybe not worth the time and effort, but in general, the more you can kind of protect your brand. And some of this stuff is kind of, you know, one-time things you can do. And some of it’s kind of a ongoing maintenance, but yeah, it’s, it’s very important to go out there and protect your brand.

Trademarks

I mean, you can do a basic things such as trademarks. A lot of times people ask, you know when should I get a trademark sooner is better than later, but if you’re on a shoestring budget just getting started, it’s probably not the most important things. We are not even producing any sales yet, but whenever you know, you’re going to keep this business longterm, go ahead and get your trademark process started. And so before we go too far into that, I mean specifically to Amazon, they shouldn’t probably just go out there and just jump and get a trademark for any website right now. Probably not.

Mike McClary (04:24):
You want to make sure that you can go out there and like I said, you have to be selling you what you should be selling. Make sure you’ve got a good product. You’re generating some profit in order to get that, but they really want to make sure that you’re getting a trademark for a brand that you’ve done a little bit of research on because you’re investing some time in the packaging, the product name and so forth. And once you’re sure that’s the product, it’s got a little bit of traction, it’s a brand name that you like, and you’re ready to go for it. Then you can go and start registering for a trademark.

I’m not a trademark lawyer. Don’t play one on TV, but I know that there are some first use laws and that it states. So don’t feel like if I start selling today and don’t get a trademark for six months, then you’re at risk for these six months. As long as you start selling can show that you sold on this day using that trademark. You get some protection already. So it’s not like you’re just out there in the wild west and some can steal it from you. You just have less protection than when you finally get that official trademark approved.

Matt Clark (05:11):
And back in the day, you know, we used to have people we’ve done it ourselves used to, I’ve been through a lawyer. I’ve used a legal zoom before, but if you’re somebody who’s selling on Amazon, we’re going to recommend they go through brand registry. Right. Absolutely. And why is that? Or can you tell people a little bit about what brand registry is all about and like how to actually use it? Yeah. Yeah. So

Mike McClary (05:28):
Brand registry is Amazon’s a program that created several years back to help protect brands. And the way I look at this, you know, everyone’s always said that Amazon doesn’t care about care about their sellers. They do care about their sellers. They produce tools for the sellers, but who they really care about the most is brands. All these tools are creating, are for brands and supporting them to sell on Amazon. So brand registry is a process to give brands, all types of protections. The first is just brand registry itself by getting approved.

If you have a trademark, then you get protections on your products and your brand, no one can go out there and just change your listing. Once it’s under your brand, it’s locked only. You can change it. So it gives you some protection right there. Cause back in the day, anyone can go out there and change any listing to any point in time.

Mike McClary (06:09):
And it was kind of a nightmare. It’s gotten much better. So now they have to go through that process. And then there’s a couple of other components of brand registry as well, kind of a next level beyond the brand registry. The core part of it, it’s called something called project zero, which gives you access to other tools that if for some reason, someone is selling your product so they can’t change your listing, but anyone still can sell any brand of products out there. If someone’s selling it, you’re aware of it and you can report them if you feel like they’re selling counterfeit goods.

So that’s another nice feature they added in there. You can act actively, go out there, search for people who might be selling your brand. Some of them might be doing it legitimately. They bought your products are reselling it. And there’s also some automated controls inside a project as well, where Amazon, as they get smarter and know more about your brand, they actually catch sellers listing your products that they believe are not listing authentic products. It’s a pretty cool feature to have in place running 24 7.

Matt Clark (07:00):
Yeah. So then, so then as far as getting brand registry, I mean, I’ve, I’ve been involved with two brands now. So we have our coffee company, which is me and a business partner e-commerce brand. And so I can’t remember how you get there. I think it’s inside of Amazon seller central, you look up brand registry and then all of a sudden you start going through the process. And from what I remember, you’re presented with like hundreds of different law firms that you can go with. And I think we just kind of sorted by best reviews and then picked one of them, never heard of them before, but then we contacted him and then my business partner kind of ran with the process after that. But it was like pretty easy to get in touch with them. I think the cost, you probably know better than me. It was cost was around a couple thousand dollars or something. Is that right?

Mike McClary (07:35):
A little more competitive now, now they have more people involved in the program. And then, and then they specifically call that marketplace, I guess, of, of lawyers IP accelerator. So that’s the program they put in place to support brand registry because before you had to go out there and find your own, right, you could take a couple of years to get a trademark with IP accelerated. The beautiful thing about is you still have to wait to go through the entire process of getting a trademark approved. They don’t make the government move any faster. Right now they’re moving a little slower, but as long as you have filed for it and the lawyer that is approved by brand registry or I pre accelerator confirms that you filed for it, you can get brand retro now within two weeks.

Matt Clark (08:10):
Yeah. Yeah. That’s all right. That’s right. Yeah. So both of these brands, neither one of them already had a trademark. So if you already have a trademark, you can just immediately go for brand registry. Neither one of these did. So it was my wife’s brand. And then this e-commerce brand that I own, we went through IP accelerator both times and it was, it was super simple. And like you said, you’re able to get brand registry, but you used to have to get a trademark, which can take six months to a year to get the trademark. But now you can get that almost immediately.

Mike McClary (08:33):
Pretty nice feature they put in place and the costs are compare, you know, comparable to other services as well. So you went through with your existing business kind of getting set up on Amazon. Yeah. And then your wife kind of started from scratch, right?

Matt Clark (08:43):
Yeah. So you know, she, she has her business that she’s been doing for a little while now. And so we had toyed with the idea of getting a trademark, but she she’s the most frugal person on the planet when it comes to building our business, she doesn’t really like doing any of the marketing or anything like that. So she just goes out there and keeps finding new products to sell. And it’s worked pretty well. It should have been profitable since day one. But we knew at some point it made sense to get a trademark cause people are just, you know, you’ve heard about people who are doing weird things.

If you don’t have a trademark and she, she eventually wants to sell this business. And so, yeah, we went up when, first thing we heard about IP accelerator however long ago, a year or two ago went through that process and found an attorney and then got her a trademark and got her brand registry, which is then given her a lot of peace of mind also. Right. There’s one

Mike McClary (09:25):
Other feature that I don’t know, they’re very public about it, but if you don’t go through IP accelerator, now I’ve heard instances of sellers now still being able to get approved or approved for brand registry, going through any other lawyer. If you already have one, like you can go through legal zoom, rocket lawyer, or any one of those companies, if you can provide the registration number that are, I guess the serial number four, it’s registered they’ll still approve you earlier than waiting for the trademark to come through. Can’t verify that yet. But I know of several sellers who’ve gotten that approved that didn’t go through IP accelerator, but still got brand Richard early,

Other Tips to Protecting Your Brand With Project Zero and Transparency

Matt Clark (09:55):
Kind of a cool feature. Cool. And then, so what else do you recommend people do for existing sellers to protect their brand better? So they, so they’ve gotten a trademark. They’ve either got it on their own, the right appeal accelerator. Now they have brand registry. What else? Yeah. So mentioned project zero. Some of this kind of run in

Mike McClary (10:12):
The background. You don’t have to do anything in there. If you have access to it, check it out. You just have to click a button inside a brand registry to apply for it. It’s a very simple process, pretty much automated approval, unless there’s some reason why, I dunno why it wouldn’t be. But you can let it run the background. You can also go out there and just do a quick check using project zero, put your brand name in and CPC. Anyone using it that you don’t expect be using an Amazon should be. You should also be Amazon. So anyone who’s ever had a used product sold by Amazon warehouse, there’ll be selling it as well. And that’s usually the only people you’ll see on there. Now that’s kind of the second level and a brand registry is the first level project zeros at second level.

Mike McClary (10:47):
The third level, which kind of takes it to the nth degree is something called transparency. And what this is, it allows you to get serialized stickers for every one of your products. That’s unique to that product, that unit and then it pretty much completely stops people from even being able to sell counterfeit products. So before you manufacture say a thousand units, you tell Amazon, they either send you, or you print out these serialized stickers, given your supplier, they put on every unit. And then when they get sent to Amazon, only those units that are scanned in and they can verify that Sera code gets a get put into inventory.

So imagine if any of your other competitors try to send in counterfeits, they can’t recreate those serialized stickers. And so it eliminates any kind of counterfeiting at all. I don’t do that yet. That’s a big amount of work to work with your manufacturers and do that. I do know several people do that. They have seen a decline in any kind of hijacking or kind of pitting claims. But if you’re ever worried, if you, if you’re having a lot of problems with people, selling are claiming to sell your product, I would go to that level and get transparency.

Trademarking Other Aspects of Your Brand & Copyrighting

Matt Clark (11:49):
And what about or you hear people doing in other businesses, but specifically for this business, do either you have experience or know other people who’ve trademarked other terms related to their products. You know, you know, you know, you see it. A lot of times people will have, I was looking the other day, a company that makes like Bowflex, for example, like Bowflex is a product name. And so they’ve trademarked that not just their brand name or company name, they actually trademarked product names and some people trademark special terms. There’s also, you know, possibly copyright protecting any media assets you have such as maybe your Amazon photos, you could potentially copyright protect those, I believe. Do you know of any people doing that for him?

Mike McClary (12:25):
Trademarking other terms now I don’t know that anyone doing that right now. Right now it’s just been the brand name. I can imagine though, if you have a product, if you give your product a name, which we do that in some cases we might

Matt Clark (12:34):
Want to consider bottle is a big one. Exactly. That’s

Mike McClary (12:36):
Not the brand necessarily. That’s the, that’s the bottle name. Yeah. That might make sense to trademark that as well. I don’t, I don’t currently do that copywriting though. We have done that. Copywriting is something that is pretty easy to do it. There’s no real cost to it. I believe as long as you submit it to some copyright and gaining standard, what it is, some government agency that does that, then it shows that that Mt of text or whatever you wrote is copyright under you. So therefore someone tries to go out there and use that for your instruction manual, the copy instructor, manual, your packaging, then you are covered there.

We had a situation that happened to us several years back where someone copied our packaging, copied our instruction manuals. We didn’t have it. Copyrighted sweater jumps through some hoops to get it resolved. We eventually did probably because they worked with us. They understood that we had a case there, but how do we copyright it? It, it would have been really simple for us to simply notify Amazon verify it’s our copyright. And they would actually remove that product. That’s infringing upon your corporates. I take that very seriously. Just like they do trademarks.

Matt Clark (13:32):
Yeah. And then what about you know, I’ve heard of people that there’ll be sourcing a product from China, and then all of a sudden somebody goes and registers their brand name in China for a trademark over there they’re equivalent. And then now their supplier in China, sometimes it is a supplier I think, but their supplier in China can no longer supply them their own product because somebody trademark their brand name over in China. And this

Mike McClary (13:55):
Happened more and more. I’m not going to say it’s like running rampant. But we have seen this happening. We actually went out there and decided to trademark our brands coming out of China. Because like you said exactly how trademarks are different in China. There I guess like patents are different in China as well. Like they, they handle the IP a little bit differently, but if a supplier there gets a trademark, the problem is they can’t export it. That gets caught at the port. They look and verify that it’s a trademark, something inside of China already. They won’t let it exports.

You can have your manufacture maker products. Everything’s the same. It can’t get out of the country. That’s the big problem there. So what we do recommend some, some people do that. If you start getting, we’re selling a specific amount of inventory and products consider trademarking your product in China as well.

Mike McClary (14:39):
It’s not very expensive. It’s actually cheaper than it is the United States. We went for a world trademark our separate law firm, their work with, but they go out there and they pretty much just add up the cost to go after these independent countries and get trademarks. And it’s one lump sum costs, thanks a couple thousand dollars as well. And then you’re protected and all these countries should that happen. But the China ones, probably the one that scares some people, because you take the spin on this money, have your product stuck and not be able to get out of the country. So how did you do it or who did it for you? Thompson Kolber feel free. That’s that the law firm for me, that we use are US-based, they’re all around and they handled the entire process.

All I did is thumb. Here’s our four brand names we’re using. Here’s where we’d like to get them trademarked, went through every single country. I think only one of our, our names was already taken by another company in China, not related to them, trying to do anything, just had it before. So we couldn’t get that one trademarked. The other ones, they have took less than a year and now we don’t have to, I don’t have to go to bed worried about my products being stuck in China, not getting

Matt Clark (15:33):
It. Yeah. That’s awesome. Cool. So anything else you want to cover as far as protecting your brand? Well, you know, in addition

Mike McClary (15:40):
To protecting your brand, there’s a lot of other reasons why you want to take advantage of brand registry, kind of focus on that. And not only do you get the protections for people not changing your accounts, people not selling counterfeit products for them, Amazon kind of going out there and keeping track of everything sporty in the background. It gives you a ton of other benefits and features. These are the things that I get excited about because when Amazon creates all these new tools for sellers lately, they’ve been creating specifically for brand owners. It’s not for a seller sung and Amazon it’s for brand owners. And there’s lots of things I had to write these down. There’s so many things out there. You get A-plus content, which is like enhanced brand content, but images, video in your product description, there is sponsored brands, whole other type of advertising.

Other Benefits of Brand Registry

We’re all used to sponsored products. The kind of you just advertise in the search results. Sponsored brands gets you the topical headline search ads. You can also put videos in there. So it’s a whole other platform. Basically. You can advertise on that. It’s a very limited group of people. Cause only brand owners can advertise there as well, low, expensive still, but it’s another way to reach. And there’s tons of other things that, you know, are you guys utilizing sponsor, sponsor van, sorry, sponsored brand videos. Now, Matt

Matt Clark (16:48):
Yeah, I’ve seen it. Cause I, our agency we use to manage the Amazon side of our e-commerce brand. I mean, they had us go check it out. Cause I was able to scroll down the middle of the page. You could see our video, like auto-playing on Amazon and took up a ton of real estate on there, which was cool.

Mike McClary (17:00):
And what I’ve seen, those definitely have higher click-through and conversion rates as well. So if you’re interested in increasing sales, conversions, traffic, all things sponsor, brand videos is the way to go, but you have to be brand registered in order to do that. I also love like when this came out a couple of years ago, brand analytics data we’ve always talked about in the past. I wish Amazon would tell us all the search terms people are searching for. And I really wish they tell us what products they end up buying. We kind of joked about it. Like they’re never going to do that. Well, they did that. They came out something called brand analytics, which tells you every week, every month, every quarter, whatever time period you want, what are the number one search terms on all of Amazon all the way from number one to a couple of million and then what products get clicked on and what products get purchased.

Mike McClary (17:42):
Incredible data that I never thought they come out with. That is probably the number one reason aside from protections that I like getting access to brand registry. Just getting all that data because you no longer have to pay for a lot of tools out there. You could just go to brand analytics type in your competitors, type in a search term and Amazon to say, here’s exactly what your customers are searching for and what products they’re ended up buying on Amazon. Now there’s a few other things in here as well. I mean, there’s Amazon stores. Did you know that you can actually contact customers?

It could be bad reviews now and try to get them to remove it then they, yeah, so they, they took away the ability to comment on reviews several months back, which was the only thing we had left to reach out to customers, give us a one-star review.

Mike McClary (18:26):
Well, they put something similar back into it. If you, again, if you are brand registered, you now have a section of your brand dashboard that talks about customer reviews, just lists all the reviews. That’s nice way just to see all their views coming in. And there’s a negative review. Anything three or less, you have two options. You can, both of them involve Amazon reaching out on your behalf. They can contact the customer and ask for more information so that you can help them through it, or they can contact the customer and just offer them a refund. We have seen that this is actually having some customers re revisit the reviews.

Maybe not giving you a five star, but maybe re lifting a one to a three or commenting in there that the, the brand owner took care of. This. That’s a great feature as well. Otherwise you have no way of reaching out to customers. And as they continue to roll out more and more things for brand owners, I think that that’s part of their strategy. They want to get more brands, actively involved selling an Amazon, maybe make you feel like you do have more control of the experience than than you used to because they’ve been taking away the ability to reach customers, but by giving brand owners, this they’re definitely trying to make people feel like they have more control over

Matt Clark (19:27):
Their business. Yeah. And it also like has always been like a super frustrating thing for sellers. Cause if you get somebody that, you know, goes and like leaves a bad review on your product, they’re like, oh, you know, cause a lot of times it happens. They’ll be like, oh, I tried to contact this brand four times. I couldn’t get ahold of anybody. And like, you know, you know, the brand owner, whether it’s a student or whoever else, and you know that they’re on top of all their messages, like that’s not how they run their business, but it’s like, some things seems to get lost in email or they’re doing something weird.

There’s literally no way to get in touch with those people. Like I would literally give this person a free product, replace it, like whatever they want, but it’s like, I just have no way to get ahold of them. So that’s, that’s really good on Amazon’s part.

Mike McClary (19:59):
Yeah. They’re there. And you know, there’s lots of other things as well. You know, in the marketing business, we like to split tests, you have to be a brand owner. You can do that inside of Amazon. There are software tools out there that were built entirely for letting you split test your listing. Amazon does that. Now you can split test your title. You can split test. I believe your images as well. And I think they’re working on split, testing, other things out there and a plethora of other things Amazon live you can actually get on there. Like I dunno, during prime day, I dare admit, I went to prime day. I bought some stuff and I watched some of the videos out there. They have these Amazon personalities talking about products. Well, you can actually do that yourself as well for your brands.

Mike McClary (20:36):
If you’re a brand owner, go on there and hop live, anytime you want to Hawk your wares as it may be. And then there’s, let’s see posts, which is kind of like their version of Facebook and social media. You can also have a way to create virtual bundles. I’m a huge proponent of those, a great way to upsell your customers and increase, you know, the customer order value and tons of other features. I mean, I can’t list all, I don’t know, 30 or so features out there, but yeah, definitely becoming brand registered, protecting your brand. Amazon gives you a lot of benefits to grow your yeah.

Listener Question: Projected Growth of New Brands on Amazon

Matt Clark (21:03):
Cool. So we, we have a question here from a listener from a previous episode, says from Abby Walters says currently in the process of saving enough to buy ASM, which is our main program for how to build a business with Amazon. Plus the cost of starting a brand on Amazon, of course have having some for rainy days. What I want to know is projected growth of new brands on Amazon. I can’t help, but sometimes get discouraged with how competitive Amazon has become. What would you say to someone wanting to invest in all of this, but worried that any, and all products are too saturated now. So maybe you want to start off that answer and I’ll kind of jump in. Yeah, sure.

Mike McClary (21:39):
So first thing I’d say is that ever since I started selling in 2013, that question comes up every single year. Don’t start this year. It’s too competitive. Then the next year don’t start it this year. It’s too competitive. Isn’t more competitive. Absolutely. There are more sellers out there. There’s more overseas sellers we’ve seen that happen out there. And so you can’t deny that there are not more sellers out there. However, it’s also a bigger marketplace now, as people moved, buying more and more online I think we’re projected to see 18% of all retail sales will be e-commerce this year in the U S alone. So that’s increase over last year. I know as more and more people buy online, there’s just more customers constantly flooding in. And the last time I checked the numbers and it’s been this way several years, there are more buyers buying on Amazon than there are the same ratio of sellers selling on Amazon. So is it working? Yes. Is it too competitive? Absolutely not. I don’t believe that to

Matt Clark (22:32):
Be the case. Yeah. You know, there’s a saying that’s you know, a rising tide lifts all boats. And I feel like we’re in the same position with e-commerce. E-Commerce and specifically Amazon both are growing like crazy. And so yeah, it’s going to attract more people wanting to sell more competitors. But also the opportunities are getting bigger and there’s more of them, even all the stuff we’ve just talked about here. We didn’t even get to everything cause it’s not really an episode about all the opportunities with brand registry, but you were talking, touching on some of those and there’s so much stuff now that you can do to make sales and promote your products on Amazon. That back in the day, you know, when maybe it was less volume and quote unquote less competition, there was like three levers you could pull, like you could rank some products PPC didn’t even exist back then.

Matt Clark (23:13):
So you could basically have different products, different listings and different ranking campaigns. Like that was it. There’s nothing else you could possibly do there. Weren’t all these promotional features, PPC strategies, any of this kind of stuff, bundles like none of that stuff existed back in the day, which means there’s a lot of ways you can win. So I wouldn’t be concerned that it’s too competitive. Maybe it’ll get to that point at some point in the future. I don’t know. But right now, like you said, that people have been saying that forever yet, here we are. We just interviewed somebody that’s going to be coming up in a future podcast episode pretty soon here. And she basically went from nothing to sell her business in three years. She just sold it. This isn’t like something that happened years and years ago. And what is she doing now?

Matt Clark (23:48):
She’s building another business following the exact same model. We have some other members that they’ve sold three different businesses following this model, and now they’re doing something else. Cause they’re almost just bored with this replicable model that they keep doing and they just bought their dream home. And like, they could literally just keep doing this and going bigger and bigger each time for them it’s literally that easy. And so it shows you that there’s still plenty of opportunities out there now. I kind of like being more specific, you know what’s the projected growth of new brands on Amazon.

It’s hard to say, I mean, giving you a specific number or something, but there still seems to be lots of room for people getting started because I mean, Amazon is still growing at 30% a year general e-commerce is growing very quickly. It’s still a small percentage of total retail. So it still seems like the prospects are very good, at least for the next say five years at, at minimum. So yeah, I think it’s a great place.

Mike McClary (24:39):
One thing that might take away from this would be also that it is more important than ever though to know what you’re doing. Yeah. So it used to be when we start off Matthew purchase to throw up a product that didn’t even have advertising Amazon, as long as you’ve put up a good product and knew how to get a few sales going, it could just happen very easily. It’s not as easy as it used to be right now. The opportunity I think is greater, but you have to know more in order to be successful right now.

And one nice thing about the topic today about like protecting your brand is that the vast majority of sellers on Amazon, they’re not going to get a trademark and register the brand. They’re just average everyday people trying to make a few sales out there. So if you’re willing to go that little bit extra mile, get a trademark at some point not right away, but then you can take advantage of all these other tools that most sellers will never know are out there, much less use. Then you can definitely give yourself a leg up on the car.

Matt Clark (25:28):
Yep, absolutely. So I think that pretty much wraps us up for this episode. Thank you Abby, for that question. If anybody else has any questions about this episode, any past episodes, any questions at all related to Amazon or e-commerce, we’re more than happy to answer them. Just go to amazing.com/branded submit your question over there and we will hopefully answer it on a future episode. So thank you very much for listening and we’ll see you in the next episode.