Amazon makes a smart move - Guest Blog from Elizabeth Ward

The great beauty of having a registered trade mark is that it tells the World who it actually is that supplies your goods and services. As the slogan says, if it doesn’t say “Kellog’s ®” on the box – then it isn’t Kellog’s ® in the box!
For sometime now, Amazon helped brand owners who sell their own branded goods stand out from the “me too” crowd. They achieved this by using a brand registry. Here, brands can register with Amazon to be listed as an official seller.
In the past, brand owners who sold such products could register their brand with Amazon, regardless of whether or not it was registered at the Trade Mark Office or IPO. In practice this gave *anyone* a monopoly over the brand name in the “Buy Box” and the listings – whether or not it was actually registered by the seller as a trade mark.
This meant prospective consumers could search against your brand name (which is hugely valuable on a marketplace like Amazon) and find non-affiliated sellers who happened to register them first – clearly an unfair situation.
Amazon are now changing the rules of the brand registry – and rumour has it that only those who have a registered the trade mark can now register officially with Amazon.The short point is this – whether or not you sell on Amazon or other online platforms, the best protection you can obtain is to register your brand as a trade mark and the best kind of trade mark you can get is a word trade mark. You can’t register descriptive brands as trade marks, so car dealer can’t be registered for a service selling cars. You could however, get a great trade mark such as Virtuoso for selling cars.
So if you’re selling on Amazon and you’ve created an attractive and distinctive brand then make sure you register it in any event. A registered trade mark / brand will always make your goods and services stand out from the crowd and reduce the opportunity for copying. As ever, we’d be happy to advise on this. Unlike the cheap an cheerful trade mark registration services we do full proper clearance services and make sure your mark is as protected as well as it can be. We’ll make sure YOU have the right advice and an asset that works properly for your business.

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This was a guest blog from Elizabeth Ward, founder of Local Business Week Partner Virtuoso Legal