Cutting Off 3P Sellers Taking Advantage of Your Brand
3P Sellers can be the source of some major frustrations, like:
Losing the Featured Offer (aka - Buy Box)
Driving up advertising costs for key terms and brand terms
MAP price violation
Counterfeiting
Poor quality product descriptions that lead to customer confusion
Unauthorized product bundling
Inappropriately marking and selling used, damaged, or expired products as new
Mislabeling products in the Amazon catalog
Bad customer experiences that lead to negative reviews and lost customers
Each of these frustrations are symptoms of a much bigger reality…
Since 3P Sellers don’t own your brand, they aren’t as committed to maintaining the integrity of your brand.
That’s not to say that all 3P Sellers are bad eggs—we’ll name a few advantages of working with the good ones—but there are plenty of bad experiences to remind every brand that the priorities of other 3P Sellers aren’t always aligned with yours.
Either way, there are some key things you can do to fight against 3P Sellers who are causing those frustrations above.
How to Cut Off Bad 3P Sellers
3P Sellers looking to simply take advantage of your brand’s momentum for their profit can only do so if they can access your supply chain and manipulate it. Here are 2 things you can do to prevent this:
Fight to control your supply chain. If you have a handful of 3P Sellers that are causing the most frustration for you, identify where they are buying your product at wholesale and find a way to cut off this access point. By turning off their access point, you’ll prevent them from easily restocking.
Limit or adjust promotions. Limit your promotions to avoid giving 3P Sellers a chance to buy up your stock and resell it later, using the savings you created through your promotion to undercut you in the buy box. You could also change your approach to promotions, limiting the number of products any one account can purchase. This could discourage anyone from leveraging your promotions to buy your product in bulk at a steep discount.
Additionally, 3P Sellers can be the source of a bigger problem related to counterfeit products. Here are ways you can report, catch, and help prevent counterfeiters from taking advantage of your customer and your brand:
Report counterfeiters. One of the most unfortunate aspects of Amazon’s 3P Seller accounts is that it creates an open door to take advantage of your customers with counterfeit products. Amazon has a Transaction Risk Management Team that responds to counterfeit and copyright infringement reports to try and stop these violations as soon as possible.
Enroll your products in Transparency. With your products enrolled in Transparency, you’ll be able to add a verification to your product listing and product packaging that can prevent counterfeits from being shipped. It also can help establish customer confidence with the Transparency QR code visible on the box.
Join Project Zero. A more proactive approach to protecting yourself from counterfeiters is to join Project Zero. By using your trademarks, logos, and other key data points about your brand and products, Project Zero uses automated brand protection software to scan listings and updates in order to find and remove suspected counterfeits. This helps protect a customer and your brand before they can be fooled into a purchase.
What about the good ones?
While some 3P Sellers can cause plenty of headaches, some brands create a strategy that leverages 3P Sellers to generate growth for their brand. You’ll have to do the appropriate vetting, but the right 3P Sellers can help you with things like…
Absorbing the costs of promotions and discounts.
Providing another inventory pool for customers to access your products if Amazon’s inventory is running low.
Creating greater brand visibility through their sales and general success with your products.
Coordinating a deliberate advertising strategy that helps you both leverage your individual budgets for maximum impact while also balancing the reality that you’re competing on the same terms
This can work well when a brand intentionally collaborates with a 3P Seller to establish a mutually beneficial relationship. Navigating that process is part of a whole other strategy that we’ll cover in a later post. We’ll link to that next post here once it’s been published.
IT’S GO TIME.
You don’t want to wait to protect yourself from the bad eggs of the 3P Seller world. Be proactive and responsive to cut off their momentum as quickly as possible. At the same time, you might want to explore the opportunities a 3P partner could provide your brand. This can help you build a broader strategy that takes advantage of the full range of opportunities Amazon provides Sellers and Vendors alike.
If you need help navigating all of that, we’d love to chat. Let’s start a conversation to see if Global Overview could be the right agency partner for your success.