What Is Amazon Listing Hijacking?

When you sell a product under your own brand name on a listing that you have created yourself, suddenly there are one or more sellers offering the same product. Moreover, their price is lower than yours. But you did not give permission to resell it. It is quite frustrating since it takes time and effort to produce a product and present it in the marketplace. This is Amazon Listing Hijacking.

When Amazon Product Listing Hijacked, competitors sell the product at a lower price. This helps them to win the Buy Box so your sales drop. But this is not the worst thing for you. 

If they are not official resellers of your product, these sellers most likely sell counterfeit goods of inferior quality. And this can turn into serious problems for you. Let's talk about this in more detail.

Why Will I Have Problems With Hijackers?

First of all, think about the fact that you have invested time, money, and effort into finding a product to sell on Amazon, making it quality, and improving performance. Therefore, illegal actions from any unscrupulous competitors look like dirty tactics of beating a competitor. Your success on Amazon is completely in your hands, so you need to be able to protect yourself from such detractors.

Secondly, Hijackers will sabotage your brand on Amazon, damaging the reputation you have been building so hard. By selling counterfeit goods on your listing, hijackers kill your work. Customers who buy a product believe it is manufactured by you as a Seller and under the specific brand. However, they get a fake and conclude that you are selling cheap trash. This damages the reputation and reduces the likelihood of buying the product by other customers.

Third, you get a lot of negative reviews that will show up on the listing. After all, the buyer believes that he purchased the product from you, and describes his negative experience and impressions where he purchased the product. Therefore, Amazon Product Listing Hijacking is dangerous not only because it harms the reputation of the product and the brand. Getting negative reviews affects the rating of the product, therefore, it reduces the listing position in organic search results on Amazon. And that's what you definitely want to avoid, don't you?

Also, you are losing sales for two reasons. The first one is a decrease in the rating of a product due to a deterioration in metrics (an increase in the number of negative reviews, returns, etc.). The second one is the loss of Buy Box as a result of price dumping by unscrupulous competitors. When Amazon Product Listing is hijacked, these people are forced to lower the price to win Buy Box. Buyers in most cases do not view the block with other sellers, which is available below the Buy Box section. They are used to click the yellow button and place an order without thinking about the details. Amazon will release the order to Hijacker only if he wins the Buy Box. And he must set a low price for this.

And finally, a price cut leads to the fact that you are forced to lower the price of your product too in order to try to return the Buy Box. This leads to a decrease in your bottom line, which will certainly upset you as well.

Therefore, you must take action to prevent this from happening and should know how to protect your listing from Amazon Hijackers.

How to Protect Your Listing from Hijackers

If you want to prevent an Amazon Hijacker attack, you can use 6 ways to protect your Amazon listing:

1. Register your own trademark.
2. Register in Amazon Brand Registry to get more control over listing.
3. Register in Amazon Transparency Program to prevent counterfeit goods from reaching customers and protect your brand.
4. Use Branding to make your product more specific.
5. Use Bundles.
6. Use Amazon Hijacker Alert tools to immediately receive messages about a possible hijacking listing.

Let's take a closer look at each point so that you get everything you need to know about how to prevent Amazon Listing Hijacking. 

• Register your own trademark

Keep in mind that this is a long-time process. It may take 8 to 18 months to resolve all legal issues. Therefore, the sooner you tackle this issue, the less likely you will get listing problems and hijackers attacks in the future. If you have registered a trademark in the United States, this doesn't mean that your rights will be protected in Canada or Mexico. If you plan to sell goods on various Amazon marketplaces and want to be fully protected, the registration procedure must be completed in each country.

You can have multiple trademarks if your business needs them. However, when registering each of them, you need to pay a fee, keep this in mind.

If your trademark is registered, you can take legal action if your rights are violated to protect your brand. This gives you more complete protection and allows you to use special Amazon programs for additional protection.

• Register in Amazon Brand Registry

This program is designed specifically to help Amazon Sellers to protect their listings and products from the influence of unscrupulous competitors. Members of the program have more control over their listings, which makes it much more difficult for the Hijacker to perform any illegal actions. Of course, participating in Amazon Brand Registry doesn't give you a 100% guarantee that your listing will not be hijacked. However, it will be much more difficult for a Hijacker to do this. An additional benefit for you is a faster response to your complaints to Amazon about illegal actions. You will also more easily prove that you own the listing if necessary to resolve the issue in your favor.

• Register in Amazon Transparency Program

This is another program that aims to protect Amazon Sellers and their merchandise. By participating in Amazon Transparency Program, sellers receive special codes which can be applied to products. When the buyer receives the goods, using a special application, he can track whether he got the original ones, or it was a fake. Before shipping an item, Amazon scans the product to ensure it is genuine. This reduces to almost zero the likelihood that the buyer will still receive a counterfeit product.

• Use Branding to make your product more specific

You need to label your products with a logo, so the customers can easily see it in the photo. An image can be used as a sample so that customers understand what goods they should receive. Make sure that your logo or brand name is part of your listing. Make a photo of the product with the logo so that it can be clearly seen. This will draw attention to your brand and help the customer understand what the original product should look like. You can also place the logo on the packaging and show it in the photos that you place on the listing. It is difficult to fake it, so the hijacker may not go for it.

• Use Bundles

Bundling can be an effective strategy to avoid being hijacked. You can bundle different products to make it difficult for hijackers to copy your brand. Add an additional product to the item that is not easy to copy. Such a set will be more difficult to counterfeit because the hijacker needs to repeat not only one of your products but also the second one.

• Track Changes in Your Listings

The Hijackers can easily imitate your products. With this, you must track the changes in your listings if it is not protected. Hijackers can change the Title, Description, change the photo, or simply attach to your listing and lower the price to win a Buy Box. If you don't want to monitor changes in your listing around the clock, you should use special tools that automatically send notifications about any changes. So, you will know for sure that something is wrong with the listing, and you need to control the situation. With this, you can reduce the hijacking instances and prevent you from losing the good reputation of your brand. 

Conclusion

Amazon Listing Hijacking is one of the biggest problems sellers face in the marketplace. If you don't take any action to prevent this, you can easily become their target. We advise you to use, whenever possible, all the available methods that we talked about. This will minimize the risk of an attack. But if you do fall victim to a hijacker, you can deal with Amazon Hijackers yourself. The main thing is to act decisively and as quickly as possible so that the situation doesn't become critical.

Keep selling, because it is profitable!