Amazon LISTING HIJACKING And How To Prevent It

Amazon Listing hijacking is a very real and gruesome threat that all private label sellers on Amazon have to deal with. Most of the time listing hijackers are people or bots that are moving into your listing and trying to steal your buy box by offering prices lower than you.  This is a danger that requires a constant lookout and by the looks of it, it is not going away anytime soon. If you are a Genuine seller with your own brand, you need to have complete knowledge about defending against these hijacking.
So first, let’s find out who are the Genuine sellers and how does Amazon recognize them.

Genuine sellers

Amazon is a huge marketplace where all kinds of sellers and buyers meet. Most of the genuine sellers with there own products have their store on Amazon. Amazon has set in place some criteria that need to be fulfilled. Their criteria are-

• The seller should be a Manufacturer?.
• seller should be an Authorised distributor/ dealer?
• The seller should have Amazon Brand registration?
• He should have Amazon seller registration?
• He should have Copyrights that allows him to sell with other sellers?

In order to become a  genuine seller on Amazon and sell private label products, One must follow these criteria. While the answer to the above questions is yes then Amazon’s system will recognize. As well as approve him has a genuine seller. But with being Amazon’s Genuine seller comes the risk of Listing Hijacking.

Listing Hijacking

In Amazon, there are those who steal or copy the genuine seller’s listing.
That means the stealing of a listing from a  genuine seller is called Amazon listing hijacking. If an unauthorized seller is selling other brand’s product and claims that they are the owner of this brand then it can be called Amazon brand hijacking. To avoid this kind of listing hijacking, top sellers use some Amazon listing hijack prevention software. Also, there are some ways to get Amazon Hijack Protection. Later in this article, we will discuss Amazon listing hijack prevention.
Also, we will discuss software & Amazon Hijack Protection.

Types of listing hijacking

Basically, there are 7 types of listing hijacking that can happen on Amazon. Like-

1. Offer Camping Hijacks– When another seller jumps into your private label listing. These hijackers will increase the number of offers on your listing.
2. Buy Box Monopolization Hijacks –  This hijacking is more dangerous than the “offer camping” hijacks. Because when there are multiple sellers on the same product, only one seller will have “Add to cart” seller right on the product listing. These hijackers can win “buy box” and showing in the area ”Sold by”
3.  Parent/child Hijacks – It happens when another seller creates an child ASIN on some genuine seller’s listing. Some seller can even create parent and then add their own Child ASINs. Though it’s not much of a problem for a genuine seller it will still divert some purchases of the product to other direction.
4. Product page hijacks– Basically, it happens when a normal seller copies the whole listing or some parts of listing from a Brand seller.
5. Copyright infringement hijacks – This type of hijacks happens when someone uses your listing information without your permission or authorization. Even sometimes anyone could sell your product under their brand name, this will be also under copyright infringement hijacks.
6. Off-site misrepresentation hijacks – It happens when a third party seller copy a whole amazon listing page. Then they upload it on other marketplaces like eBay, Rakuten, NewEgg etc
7. Hybrid method hijacks–  This hijacking is the combination of all the above hijacks types. It could steal genuine sellers sales, can damage the brand reputation and can cause customers to lose faith. And the most shocking thing is, if genuine seller stops monitoring this kind of hijacks, Hijackers can even shut down the original brand business.

How to prevent listing hijacking ?

Let’s talk about how to prevent listing hijacking, remove Amazon hijacker and get rid of Amazon hijacker.
To Solve this problem we can do the following things primarily.

• Monitor listings
• Monitor Brand in e-commerce marketplaces
• If hijackers are found then try to connect with them
• Coordinate with authorized seller
• Contact with amazon for seller support

Now let’s discuss how Amazon can help us directly to solve this problem. Furthermore, keep our Private label secure. Also, how Amazon can remove the hijacker.

Copyright

To get help from Amazon we have to contact their copyright group. But we have to keep in mind that Amazon will not shut down other sellers who sell their products.
So, if a genuine seller wants to shut down a hijacker who used Amazon ASIN piggybacking techniques to simply piggyback on their original listings, then the original brand seller can claim copyright on Amazon and ask them to remove the hijacker. But for that, the brand owner has to prove that his/her listing is original and they have the legal copyright.

To prove that, brand owners should have their own website. Also, they need to keep every listing that is uploaded to Amazon, and on that website. Because Amazon takes this kind of claims very seriously. So, we have to make the specific claim that there is a copyright infringement against our company website.
Here are a few top strategies you can use to remove these listings

1. Report a violation.

Your first action can be to report a violation on Amazon when you see that your listings are getting hijacked. This will work wonders for BOT. But removing professional counterfeiters with a report might be a bit hard as they take a lot of time to design their deception.

2. Contact the Hijacker.

A well-written threat to the hijacker can help you here. Most of the hijackers are just trying to reap the buy box benefits until the seller is actually getting them removed. So the more you monitor your listings the better it is for you. When you do find out that there is a hijacker in your listing, you can easily send them a threatening message. Make sure not to go overboard with the language.

  3. Make a test purchase.

Another course of action that you may take is making a test buy from the hijackers. You have to do it as an unknown customer. The objective here is to buy a hijacked product from them with the fastest shipping. And then you take some photos as proof and try to gather other evidence that will certify that it is a counterfeit product. Then you simply contact Amazon seller performance with the evidence and Amazon will analyze the evidence and take action within a week.

4. Hijack prevention Softwares.

Many big sellers use Amazon listing hijack prevention software to get rid of Amazon hijackers. For example, Amazon listing hijack alert tool is a popular tool to prevent Amazon rules infringement.
Amazon listing hijack alert has many nice features. Every 15 minutes it will check all the listings. If any information gets changed, any review is deleted any or buy box status is changed, hijack alert will immediately send you information about the affected listings. Seller will get notification via mail/text message.

Softwares

There are 3 kinds of Software that monitor and provide hijack Protection.

• AMZAleart
• Listing Eagle
• Bindwise

These three are Amazon listing hijack prevention. And this 3 software ensure Amazon Private label.
Listing hijacking is can be deadly if your listings and items are not monitored properly. There are thousands of companies who are dedicated to creating hijack bots and other methods just to achieve a little and sometimes massive income of a stolen listing. Amazon is regularly taking steps to reconcile this but the hijackers are also getting smarter. So it is likely that this is gonna go on for a long time. This is why you must know your defenses for such situations and you must keep your listings in constant monitoring. It can easily give you bad publicity which might be hard to recover from if not attended timely.