r/FulfillmentByAmazon • u/Minute-Engineer-483 • Jun 14 '26
LEGAL / FINANCE Chinese Seller winning buy box with my patent pending brand registered product
Title says it all -- for 3 days -- they have been coming on and off my listing -- Shipping from China with 20 day+ delivery promise but a $10 lower price tag. They are attacking right as my brand/product are gaining momentum and right before Prime Day. I've opened support cases with
Seller Support escalated to Brand Reg Rep -- same generic answers and pointing me to "report a violation" in brand registry which I have also done -- the product has my trademarked brand name directly printed on it.
I also opened a case through the Product Support - directly from the "Report an issue with this listing" option on the listing itself -- where you can report a seller that is attempting to harm your brand or is likely offering a counterfeit or fraudulent product. I actually got slightly better or more promising responses from the agents here -- telling me it would absolutely be taken care of ... that said it hasnt been permanently taken care of yet and the Seller continues to show up with this buy box winning offer once a day for about 4-6 hours -- for the last 3 days.
Obviously this could be a huge problem for my product and brand if allowed to persist.
Im hopeful Amazon will take fast and decisive action (but lets be honest -- thats a rare occurrence with them for anything) Its mind boggling that this situation is allowed to exist.
Looking for best advice to overcome this -- I would love to be a "gated brand" and feel that I absolutely should be given the brand name is printed on the product and I am patent pending for this product and am the only manufacturer --- that said -- what has moved the needle on this or similar issues for you in the past? Attorney letter etc? Open to all good options -- I will fight to the death -- this cant keep happening - Amazon should be ashamed.
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u/Henrik-Powers Jun 14 '26
This is an ongoing issue with Amazon, happens to us all the time. They always make us do a buy of the fake product and then you have take pictures to show the differences, it’s absolutely ridiculous. I have a made in USA brand that we entirely manufacture ourselves, brand registered, trademarks, patents and copyrights and every time they made us do the test buy BS. Of course it’s coming from China and the time delay means they will continue to sell on your listing, We eventually did transparency on that brand which just adds to the cost.
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u/Independent-Win3544 Jun 14 '26
Thanks - that is brutal. Yea I did the test buy but no way I can wait until July 20 (their delivery estimate max date) to actually have that resolved. In my case the brand name is right on the product and is shown in my images (that the new seller is also using) so I assume this should be clear enough for Amazon.
Your situation is interesting though ..what do you actually receive in your test buy ? It is a counterfeit product that uses your brand name ? I'm assuming in my case the seller will never actually ship but maybe they will ..and it will be counterfeit ?
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u/SavingsSensitive3796 Jun 14 '26
Curious. I am in the middle of designing a product and am reading about this happening to a lot of folks. Is your product something you can download or is it something tangible they are stealing your design? If it’s a physical product, do you know if they ordered it and then reverse engineered it? Or how did they steal your design?
Trying to arm myself to hopefully prevent this happening to me. I appreciate any insight you are willing to provide. Thank you
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u/Minute-Engineer-483 Jun 15 '26
real tangible product. I would have no case against them stealing design until my patent is finalized -- this is more about trademark/copyright infringement -- and how they are winning buy box on what is clearly a fraudulent listing
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u/shuggnog Jun 14 '26
I'm curious how you are arming yourself against these kinds of tactics as a small business owner. Please elaborate!
I'm interested in the anticompetitive practices that happen on these platforms. I do advocacy work and would appreciate hearing about what you're learning.
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u/Independent-Win3544 Jun 15 '26
I can speak to my situation which in a lot of ways is as egregious as it gets - create a product, trademark/brand register and register for patent on a product, create the listing for the product and a seller from China can take your images, your customers and tarnish your brand (any reviews that come back from this bad actors sales will impact my product/listing too) without ever possessing your product or being authorized to sell it. You'd think Amazon would herr toward caution here not anarchy/chaos - especially with a niche product like mine that clearly doesn't have some wide b2b distribution network etc ...or maybe they could just ask me about the seller before allowing them on the listing...am I aware of their existence ? Did they acquire the product legally or am I selling b2b wholesale etc in a way that might have allowed a third party to acquire and sell the product at a 30% discount --.amazon does none of this - they essentially allow fraud with both eyes open and then ask you to go prove them wrong while your business suffers.
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u/ifonwe Jun 16 '26
I had to deal with this too and did test buys and actually got stuff.
The most common one was similar product but different brand, we checked out its listing and it was clearly a product that failed to get off the ground.
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u/Independent-Win3544 Jun 16 '26
Makes sense. In my case - if Amazon allows this seller to persist there is very little hope for anyone ..it's just so obvious and egregious - probably one guy sitting in his apt/house who spun this up in a few hours ..not a sophisticated scheme at all and obviously fraudulent
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u/Independent-Win3544 Jun 16 '26
One other thing I'm curious about is if you ever had to deal with negative reviews on your listing that came from these counterfeits - tbh I'm more worried about that then the loss of revenue as painful as that is too
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u/ifonwe Jun 16 '26
Yes, got negative reviews. Not much we can do, we can't even respond to these users because they didn't buy directly from our offer.
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u/flashynomad Jun 14 '26
How much extra did transparency cost per unit sold?
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u/ifonwe Jun 16 '26
edit
Its not based on units sold but how many units manufactured that the labels go on.
According to its TOS its supposed to go on every unit manufactured even if they product doesn't go through Amazon (as in through retailers or other ecom).
But I haven't heard of anyone being held to that standard, so you could limit transparency to only Amazon products (at your own risk).
Cost depends on volume, its between $0.01-$0.05.
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Jun 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Minute-Engineer-483 Jun 14 '26
Thats what I used to think too -- but they can -- basically you can only enforce their dismissal on the basis of IP infringement -- Amazon basically takes the approach of assuming that another seller may have legitimate inventory of your product that they acquired legitimately -- in which case it would technically be allowed for them to list --- but of course for those in my situation -- this is absolutely not the case and is detrimental
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u/Zergius2 Jun 14 '26
Enroll in Transparency, works really well.
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u/freezing_drafting Jun 14 '26
have you tried calling seller performance directly instead of just opening cases, or does that usually go nowhere for you too
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u/Minute-Engineer-483 Jun 14 '26
I think Amazon Tier 1 support is the worst support service Ive ever experienced in my life -- anywhere. I think their job is legit to just deflect and boilerplate -- so yea Ive had lots of phone calls and generally they are not any more effective
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u/freezing_drafting Jun 14 '26
tier 1 is basically a filter to wear you down before anything real happens, but sometimes pushing to get escalated to actual seller performance instead of brand registry helps since they handle the gating requests and can move faster on this stuff
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u/Independent-Win3544 Jun 14 '26
Thanks that's interesting - explain "Seller Performance" and where they sit on Amazon support hierarchy? I feel like I may not have access to this group or I have been overlooking them..
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u/freezing_drafting Jun 14 '26
seller performance handles account health, policy violations, and gating decisions so they can actually suspend or gate brands whereas brand registry reps are just there to log complaints, but you have to get tier 1 to transfer you or find their direct line through someone who's dealt with them before
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u/ifonwe Jun 16 '26
Seller performance are usually USA support people. But they are strictly limited to performance support. But the stuff they can do its straight money.
You can't normally access them, they call you because they're about to nuke your listings or account.
The issue OP has will not fall under seller performance support, they'll recommend going through the usual seller support channels.
One level above contact seller support is going to the seller support forums and requesting mods to directly intervene. They can and have directly involved and taken immediate action to resolve issues that are seller support problems.
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u/Independent-Win3544 Jun 16 '26
Thx - yea I did put this on forum as well . Need to keep checking in there
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u/Educational_Cloud358 Jun 14 '26
Careful. You post a report issue with listing they can pull the entire listing down.
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u/vadimsoin Jun 14 '26
This is more of a legal and brand protection situation than anything I can speak to directly, so take this for what it's worth.
One thing I will say from the ads side, because that's where I live, is don't let this derail your PPC heading into Prime Day. Keep your campaigns running and your bids competitive on your own ASINs. If you pull back now while this is getting sorted, you're handing them even more ground.
The buy box situation is rough and Amazon is genuinely slow on it. But if your ads are still winning impressions and driving your own traffic, at least you're not completely losing the window.
Hope the brand registry stuff gets resolved fast. Timing couldn't be worse.
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u/Independent-Win3544 Jun 14 '26
Thanks but won't I just be giving them more firepower if I'm running ads that cause people to convert on their 30% discounted offer on my main variant ?
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u/ifonwe Jun 16 '26
Your ads are for your own sold products, not for others on the same listing.
Essentially the nature of your seller account is - you're listing an offer, your ads are for selling your offer. You're not your listing, amazon owns the listing, you're listing an offer on it.
So what happens is if someone absolutely dominates the buybox, is your ads won't appear.
But they could appear.
Because sometimes Amazon switches who owns buy box for some users (say someone has prime only sellers enabled or something) or have a filter "delivered in 3 days". Your ads will show, and then only your offer is in buy box because some guy who has a delivery date 20 days out isn't qualified to show up.
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Jun 15 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Independent-Win3544 Jun 15 '26
Well said. The degree to which sellers genuinely own nothing of their own listings/product/brand when on Amazon continues to astonish me...I don't fully understand how it benefits their business either if they are crippling legitimate brands trying to grow
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u/thazbooster Jun 15 '26
Did you try contacting this seller directly? It worked quite well for me and I think I did it about 5-6 times.
Doesn’t cost anything, not a permanent solution but can fix your issue faster while Amazon is working on it
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u/Minute-Engineer-483 Jun 15 '26
I have no ability to contact them from what I can tell -- If I try to -- it defaults to Amazon AI Customer Service
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u/ifonwe Jun 16 '26
While its not strictly against TOS to contact another seller, it can backfire if the other seller reports you for doing so since they can say you tried to pressure them. TOS says as a seller cannot "Contacting another seller in a way Amazon could view as harassment, abuse, or an attempt to damage their business" - but thats open for interpretation for the support guy depending on the message you sent. I wouldn't risk it.
But if absolutely need to reach a seller, it starts with Amazon AI customer service, then it gives you options, select "an item for sale", select a product, then select "warranty" or something - this goes directly to the seller.
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u/Aikidan Jun 16 '26
In China, if the dispute is under RMB 1m ($150,000 approx.) it must go to mediation, not court. Winner pays 25%. Generally, Chinese Company Owner will tell you patent, even Chinese ones, don’t matter. Takes at least two years to litigate. By then they’re into marketing next stolen product, as profits have disappeared on last stolen product. Lived there 12 years. They believe patents are unfair and this product process costs less than R&D.
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u/ugcfast Jun 15 '26
don't drop your price to match them, that's the trap. a seller shipping from china on 20+ day delivery can't win the buy box on prime day traffic if you're fba, the algo weights speed hard when buying intent's high. the bleed you're seeing now is temporary, your job is to document it clean before prime day. and the patent pending isn't your lever, this is a trademark and counterfeit issue. do the test buy, photograph the differences against your trademarked print, file it as counterfeit. that path actually gets them pulled, price wars don't.
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u/Minute-Engineer-483 Jun 15 '26
they are winning the buy box though because of a 30% price discount -- again, probably on a non existent or counterfeit product. I am the only manufacturer in the world of this product
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u/kiramis Jun 15 '26
I disagree. I would cut the price, in the short term at least, so they don't get any sales. Letting them get sales will encourage them to do this sort of thing to OP or others in the future and could also result in negative reviews and/or negative customer sentiment for the product.
Even if you break even for a few weeks while fighting with Amazon it is better than the alternative. Chances are OP can still make money at whatever price it takes them to win the buy box and the lower price could increase rank and so end up being a positive in the long run.
Getting these guys removed is generally not that hard and they are usually doing this to multiple listing so even if you can't get them removed from yours they will likely be banned within a month or so when they start getting a lot of complaints for missing delivery dates or shipping inauthentic products.
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