If you sell on Amazon, you have probably run into a wall. The tools that let you control your own listings — A+ Content, a branded storefront, the ability to report a counterfeiter and have Amazon act on it — all sit behind Amazon Brand Registry. And Brand Registry will not let you in without a trademark.
That surprises a lot of sellers, who assumed a registered LLC, a logo file, and a product on the shelf added up to a brand. To Amazon, they do not. What follows is what Amazon actually asks for, and the specific places sellers get rejected.
What Amazon actually requires
To enroll a brand, you need one of two things:
- An active registered trademark from an approved government intellectual property office, or
- A pending trademark application. Amazon's route for this is its own IP Accelerator program, which connects you with law firms on its panel and grants earlier access to Brand Registry benefits while the application is still pending.
The mark also has to be the right kind of mark. Amazon accepts a text-based mark — a word mark — or an image-based mark that contains words, letters, or numbers. A purely graphic logo with no wording in it will not do the job.
Why Amazon insists on this
Brand Registry is not a loyalty program. It hands you the power to have listings altered or removed, and Amazon will not give that power to someone who cannot demonstrate a legal right to the name. A trademark registration is a government determination that the name is yours for those goods. It gives Amazon something defensible to act on, and it gives you something to point at when a competitor disputes your takedown.
It also means the protection you get through Amazon is only as good as the registration underneath it. A weak or badly drafted mark produces weak enforcement.
Word mark or logo? This is the decision that matters
Sellers often file the logo because the logo is what they think of as the brand. For Amazon purposes that is usually the wrong way round.
“The name, in any font, color, or styling — including on a redesigned package.”
“That specific image. Rebrand the logo and the protection may no longer match.”
A word mark travels with you. You can change your packaging, your typeface, and your color palette, and the registration still covers the name. A design mark protects the design, and at enrollment Amazon asks you to upload the logo exactly as it appears on the trademark record. If you have refreshed your branding since filing, that is an immediate mismatch.
Many sellers eventually want both. If the budget only stretches to one, the name is almost always the asset worth owning.
The exact-match rule
The brand name you type into the enrollment form must match the trademark text exactly. Spacing and symbols count. Amazon's own example is instructive: a mark registered as “Buy with Prime” will not approve an application submitted as “BuywithPrime.” Differences in capitalization are accepted; nothing else is.
This is a filing decision, not an enrollment decision. If your product packaging says NorthBay and you register North Bay, you have created a problem for yourself months before you ever open the Brand Registry portal. Decide how the name is written, then register it that way, then print it that way.
The rule that stops most applications: permanently affixed
Amazon requires a photograph of your product or its packaging with the brand name visibly and permanently affixed. It is specific about what counts.
The name applied during production.
- Printed directly onto the product or packaging
- Sewn or woven into the item
- Laser etched
- Engraved or molded in
Anything that could be added or peeled off afterwards.
- Stickers and adhesive labels
- Stamps and hang tags
- Stock photography
- Digitally altered images
- Computer-generated mockups and renders
Sellers who planned to apply a printed label to white-label stock get caught here, and so do sellers who submit the beautiful render their designer produced instead of a photograph of the actual item. If you are still at the sourcing stage, raise this with your manufacturer now — changing how the name is applied is cheap before a production run and expensive after one.
The verification code goes to whoever is on the trademark record
This is the part almost nobody anticipates, and it is the part we get called about.
After you submit, Amazon verifies that you are the rights owner by contacting a public contact associated with the trademark registration and issuing a verification code. That person has to pass the code to you before enrollment completes.
Who is that contact? Whoever is listed on the public record at the trademark office. If you filed through a discount online service, it may be the service. If a former business partner, a marketing agency, or your manufacturer filed the mark, it is them. If your attorney filed it, it is your attorney — which is fine, provided you are still on speaking terms and the firm still exists.
We have seen sellers discover at this exact moment that they do not control their own brand. It is recoverable, but it is far easier to get the ownership and the correspondence details right at filing than to unpick them under time pressure during a product launch.
The application must come from the trademark owner
Related, and equally overlooked: Amazon requires the Brand Registry application to be submitted by the owner of the trademark — the individual or entity that legally holds the rights.
So if the mark is registered to your supplier, to a company you have since dissolved, to your co-founder personally, or to an entity that does not match the one running your seller account, enrollment stalls. Assignments can be recorded to fix this, but recordal takes time you may not have.
What you unlock
Enrollment is free once you hold the trademark, and it opens up two different sets of tools.
- Protection. Report a Violation for counterfeits and listing hijacks, automated protections, and access to programs such as Transparency for item-level authentication.
- Selling and marketing. A+ Content on your detail pages, a branded Store, Brand Analytics, and eligibility for programs including Amazon Vine.
Worth knowing: you can enroll even if you do not sell in the Amazon store yourself. Without a selling account you lose the marketing tools, but you keep the enforcement ones — which matters if other people are selling your product and you simply want the ability to police it.
Timing, and why this is not a last-minute task
US trademark registration is measured in months, not weeks, and that is before any refusal from the examining attorney. If your plan is to launch in the fourth quarter with A+ Content live, the application needed to be filed a long way ahead of that.
If you have not launched yet, you can still file — an intent-to-use application secures your filing date before you have made a single sale, and you prove use later. Our guide to Statement of Use filings covers that second half of the process.
Where sellers go wrong, in short
- Registering a logo when they needed the name
- Filing the name with spacing that does not match the packaging
- Submitting a render or a sticker photo as the product image
- Letting a filing service or supplier sit as the owner or public contact
- Choosing a descriptive name that struggles to register at all
- Starting the process eight weeks before a launch
Every one of these is a decision made at filing, which is why the trademark and the Amazon strategy really want to be planned together rather than in sequence.
Before you file
Search first. A name already registered by someone else for similar goods will not register for you, and finding that out after you have committed to packaging is the expensive way to learn it. Our walkthrough of searching the USPTO database covers the method, and there is a free worksheet in the resource library.
If you would rather it were handled, our flat-fee trademark registration includes the clearance search, the application, correspondence with the examiner, and — relevant here — getting the ownership and correspondence details right the first time so the Amazon verification step is not a surprise.
Amazon changes its program requirements from time to time. Confirm the current rules in the Brand Registry portal before you enroll.
This article is general information, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Rules differ by state and change over time. Please speak with a licensed attorney about your own situation.