Protect Your Brand on Amazon with Brand Registry—Updated Sep 2019

Curious about Amazon Brand Registry? Here’s what you need to know about this program, and how to get started with it.

What is Amazon Brand Registry?

Amazon’s Brand Registry is a program for sellers who manufacture or sell their own branded products and want to protect their brand on Amazon. The program’s goal is to make it easier for sellers with their own brands to manage those brands by protecting the content on their product listings from tampering by other sellers. Registering your brand with Amazon through Brand Registry gives you increased control over your products’ titles, details, bullet points, product description, metadata, and other attributes. This program also gives you the ability to list products without UPCs or EANs—for instance, if you make customized, one-of-a-kind items that don’t naturally have UPCs or EANs.

Who should take advantage of Brand Registry?

Here four scenarios in which Brand Registry will help you control your brand equity by locking down the content on your listings:

1. You sell your own private label products on Amazon, and you want to make sure the content you’ve submitted for your products doesn’t get changed by other sellers. Brand Registry provides a great way to lock down that content.
2. You may have other resellers listing your brand of products on Amazon, but they haven’t done a good job of creating accurate or complete content for the site. Again, Brand Registry lets you lock down that content once you’ve updated it to your liking.
3. Similar to number 2, you may have products that you don’t sell on Amazon, but that some reseller may eventually sell on the site. Through Brand Registry, you can create “shell” listings and lock down high-quality content that all future resellers will be forced to use.
4. You sell products on behalf of a brand, and you have an interest in ensuring the quality of that brand’s product listings. Even if you aren’t the rightsholder of a brand you sell on Amazon, you may be able to get Brand Registry permission to lock down content if you send Amazon a letter of approval from the brand’s rightholders for you to control and update Amazon listings content on behalf of the brand

How do you apply for Brand Registry?

Here’s how to get started with Brand Registry.

First, log in to Seller Central.

Search for Brand Registry. You’ll find a link that takes you to the Brand Registry application page.

Next, you’ll select a key attribute for each SKU you’re submitting to Brand Registry.

You’ll then have the opportunity to submit information demonstrating the specific situation for which you are applying for Brand Registry. You’ll be asked to identify what product dimension you want to use as the unique identifying criteria for each SKU in your brand—known as the “key attribute.” This can be something like the UPC, EAN, or possibly the manufacturer part number. If some of your products come in different package quantities, you must be careful, as you might be using the same UPC, manufacturer part number, or model number for different package sizes of the same item. In this case, you may want to consider using something that combines UPC and package quantity—like “UPC_Package Quantity”—as the key attribute, if your product commonly is sold in different package quantities or resellers create their own package quantities. You can pick whatever variable or combination of variables you want as your Brand Registry identifier, so think strategically about what you select.

Now, you wait for Amazon to (hopefully) approve your Brand Registry application!

Once you’ve selected and submitted each product’s key attribute, it will take a few days for Amazon’s Brand Registry team to review and hopefully approve your application. Once you’re granted Brand Registry permission, you’ll need to resubmit all of your feeds for your product content to be locked down by Amazon. Amazon will also apply a global catalog identifier (GCID) to each SKU in the brands that you have locked down. Each GCID is unique, and will be tied to your third-party seller account such that no one else can change the content that you have submitted (with the exception of product images).

An important note about GCIDs

When you resubmit your feeds in Seller Central, be sure to check the error reports. If a GCID is not successfully assigned to your products, you will not have greater control over your product detail pages. To ensure that GCIDs are assigned to your products, verify that your product listings have the following:

• Brand name (case sensitive)
• Key attribute

It’s not important to know what the GCIDs are on your products, but rather to know that there is a GCID tied to each SKU you’ve had locked down in Brand Registry.

How to view your GCIDs

Here’s how to view your products’ GCIDs:

1. Go into Seller Central, and under Inventory, select Inventory Reports.
2. On the Inventory Reports page, select Active Listings Report from the report drop-down list.
3. Once the report has been generated, open the file using a spreadsheet program (such as Microsoft Excel).
4. In the report, locate the column titled product-id. If your product has been assigned a GCID, you will see an alphanumeric, 16-character value with no spaces or hyphens. For example: 5C5CXXX999XXX999

One final note: Any data you submit after being approved will be locked down for only you to change, with the exception of images which any seller can upload. But IF YOU DO NOT SUBMIT A PARTICULAR COLUMN OF DATA to be locked down, another seller can come along and provide data. So if certain types of data or fields of data are important to you, make sure to submit them in your feed AFTER your brand is approved for Brand Registry.

That’s it! Enjoy the newfound protection and peace of mind you now have when it comes to the content on your brand’s Amazon product listings.