Amazon Sellers’ News 10/28/19 with CJ Rosenbaum: Breaking News for Sellers: 3 HUGE Stories about IP Complaints
Specialized News for Sellers in a 5 Minute Video:
IP Complaints – 3P Sellers Buying from Manufacturer
IP Complaints – Drop Shipping from Walmart & Sam’s Club
IP Complaints against Book Sellers
Amazon Sellers’ News 10/28/19:
Intellectual property right complaints against third party sellers when sourcing directly from the manufacturer.
Now, I know that sounds ludicrous, but starting on Wednesday, increasing on Thursday and Friday and over the weekend, more and more third-party sellers are receiving intellectual property right complaints from the manufacturers when they are buying directly from the manufacturers. Now if you are sourcing directly from the manufacturer and there’s a contract that says you can’t sell online, you might have an issue. If you are not under a contract that limits where you can resell your products, chances are that IP complaint is entirely baseless.
Drop shippers sourcing products from Walmart or Sam’s Club.
If you’re dropshipping, specifically getting your products from Walmart or Sam’s Club, you have to review the new TOS. You have to see exactly what the new terms of service say about dropshipping and the branding that exists on the packages once they show up that consumer’s door. Amazon is cracking down on this like crazy. There’s a dramatic increase, so if you’re a drop shipper, specifically Walmart or Sam’s Club sourced products, you have to make sure you’re in 100% compliance with the TOS.
People and companies who are selling books.
For the last two and a half or three years or so, there’s been a dramatic number of litigations started by the O+Z Law Firm in courthouses around the country. Most of the cases have been started in the Southern District of New York by O+Z, but they’ve also started cases in other venues around the country for textbooks. They represent McGraw Hill, Cengage, and Pearson, and they’ve sued a lot of sellers for counterfeit textbooks. The problem with textbooks is that the counterfeits are coming from India where the counterfeits are of a higher quality than genuine books, and sellers all over the world to getting caught up in this because it’s very difficult to tell which are counterfeit, which are real.
What’s going on lately is that non-textbook sellers are also starting to have problems with intellectual property rights complaints. A lot of sellers have had to shift their books from new into used, even though they’ve never been read before, and even the used books being subject to intellectual property rights complaints. So if you are a bookseller, I recognize that it’s hard to pivot to get into other industries, but you may want to start exploring what else you can sell, because the booksellers, in particular, are a huge target right now and you know how to sell and you know how to use the dashboard.
Inside Amazon.
Amazon calls the team that deals with Amazon vendors the selling partner support team. Amazon claims that it is establishing a greater and greater size team to work with vendors more closely. This we believe is to help solve problems that Amazon has with its vendors when they’re ordering products and their left-hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Where they’re not paying for products that they are receiving and then selling.
