Amazon Sellers’ News 1/24/20 with CJ Rosenbaum: Trouble Selling Books on AMZ? New Button to Get Call About a Plan of Action, Restricted Products, Trademark & Patent Accusations, Brand Protection Services for Private Label Sellers
Sellers are having trouble selling books, which is kind of ironic.
That’s how Amazon was first built, by selling books, but new sellers who are jumping on the book bandwagon are having problems getting listing suspensions. Also, if you are selling books, you need to be incredibly careful that you don’t sell any counterfeit books, especially textbooks. Cengage, McGraw Hill, Pearson, the big giant textbook manufacturers have started numerous lawsuits all over the country and sued hundreds of sellers for selling counterfeit books. The problem is the counterfeit books are often of a higher quality than the real ones.
We’re seeing a slight uptick in the number of restricted product suspensions.
Make sure when you’re listing a product, go back each and every time, and make sure the product’s not restricted.
Trademark and patent accusations.
Now what’s going on is that sellers who are using “compatible with”, which is totally fine, it does not violate anybody’s intellectual property rights, but you’re getting the complaints from big companies, Apple, Samsung, LG, so just be aware of it. If you’re using the words “compatible with” you may run into problems with some really significant brands and you just need to do the evaluation. Is it worth the fight?
Brand protection services that we offer to private label sellers.
The flip side of that is knowing when a baseless IP complaint has been asserted against you, you have the possibility of collecting damages. If you’re a private label brand, you need to protect your brand by building something into your product that other sellers cannot deliver. Taking your product outside the first sale doctrine. If you’re a third party seller selling other branded products, then as long as you are delivering the same exact product and the consumer is receiving all the benefits of that product, then you are inside the first sale doctrine and whether you are inside the first sale doctrine or outside the first sale doctrine, that is the entire ball of wax when it comes to selling other branded products and still to this day, most brands do not have anything added to their products that stop you from selling their products as long as they are genuine.
Amazon has a button on some of your dashboards where you can hit the button and request that one of Amazon’s team members call you.
Not all sellers are seeing this, but a certain number is, and if you have this, you can hit that button. You will get a call back from one of Amazon staff, but, just like it’s 2015 all over again, Amazon staff has advised sellers to admit to doing something wrong, even if you did nothing wrong.
Now at this time, we still advise against that because while it might get your account back on or it might get your listing back on, you are also now admitting to doing something wrong, which violates the terms of service, which means Amazon can cut you off and you will have no remedy because you put in writing that you did something wrong. So our advice has always been, do not admit to doing something wrong unless you totally did, and you are 100% sure that Amazon knows about it. I will keep you updated as this progresses and as more and more sellers get this button because it is not 2015, it is 2020, and times have changed.
