Amazon provides a wonderful online venue for vendors to offer their products to a global audience. The use of the Amazon marketplace to present and sell products has literally been the main staple of success for many vendors who didn’t have the resources to reach such a wide customer base. Besides this online venue being used to increase sales and product visibility, Amazon has also been used by counterfeiters and thieves to steal profits from vendors. This is accomplished by counterfeiting a product’s Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN), which is assigned to every listed product.
Amazon Gating Process Works Hand-in-Hand With Brandlox
Previously, Amazon was absent when it came to securing a product’s ASIN. Recently, Amazon has implemented a process called “gating” to minimize the incidents of counterfeiting and profit theft. The process of gating involves charging third-party sellers a fee between $1,000 – $5,000 to sell a merchant’s product on Amazon. This fee also must be accompanied with some sort of communication from the merchant giving the third-party vendor permission to sell its products. One of Amazon’s main theories behind this move is that only legitimate vendors will pay the fee and provide the documentation, providing a more legitimate venue for them in the long run.
Problems With Gating
Again, the process of gating assumes that only legitimate vendors will enter Amazon’s marketplace. Look at this theory from the perspective of a bank robber. Will they pay $1,000 for the resources it takes to steal $20,000? They absolutely will, just as an ASIN thief may pay the fee and provide fake documentation with the hopes of obtaining a huge profit off of their investment. Their investment, of course, is putting themselves in a position to steal money from your product. If you think this is an unlikely scenario, look at some of the cyber breaches that have occurred at the highest levels of the White House during the 2016 election. Currently, there isn’t an online venue that is guaranteed to be free from fraud.
Can Gating Work?
Like many security and protection products, Amazon’s gating system works most effectively with other software that will monitor your specific products and alert you immediately when those products’ ASINs are compromised. At the moment, only Brandlox software works specifically with the Amazon online market to monitor each individual ASIN and send alerts to you to warn you of the fraudulent activity. Brandlox even provides the resources to generate and send a legal Cease and Desist Order to the party who is threatening your profits.
What Else Can Brandlox Do?
One of the main reasons for gating is due to the large number of third-party distributors on Amazon. Although many of these vendors are legitimate, they are numerous and hard to monitor. Brandlox allows vendors to not only monitor unauthorized use of its product’s ASIN, but it can also monitor authorized users to insure the product is being displayed in a manner that is fitting with your mission.
Brandlox can monitor more than 2,000 ASINs, so handling big business isn’t a problem. Amazon is a store that never closes, and without Brandlox, it is impossible to monitor all of your products when the variety is in the hundreds and thousands.
Visit Brandlox today to help better secure your Amazon-listed product. Prices start as low as $29 per month with no obligation. For more information, call 866-882-8484.
