Unauthorized Sellers

Who are they? Will you ever figure it out.

The Amazon platform provides great opportunity to build and grow your business. Unfortunately, many brands encounter unauthorized sellers offering their products online without any idea who these sellers are. The major complaint that we hear from brands is that these unauthorized sellers degrade their pricing by offering products below their MAP. To add on to this issue, there are now more claims of counterfeit products. Also, the brand has no way to determine the chain of custody for items that are consumable. If you know or can figure out who the unauthorized seller is you can cut them off from buying your product.

How to Find Unauthorized Sellers:

1. If you have no time or patience to address this issue, you may find one of the services listed to be helpful: VantageBP.com, Uabide.com, IPShark.com, Vorys.com. We are in no way affiliated with these groups. We do not profit from mentioning them in this post. These companies have reputations for being able to monitor online activity for brands looking to identify unauthorized sellers.

2. This is the least pleasant path to take. You can use the following resources to identify unauthorized sellers:

- Use sellerratings.com to see information related to this seller including past storefront names

- Use Google to see if this seller has used any of these names to create a company website. Use WhoIs to determine the company website's domain information.

- Check other 3rd party platforms (eBay, WalMart, etc.) to see if anyone is using any of these seller names.

- Use LinkedIn, Indeed, etc.

- Check various Secretary of State websites for company name, DBAs, etc.

- Use the tracking of lot numbers, infrared pens, etc. to track products and determine who purchased them from you.

The vast majority of unauthorized sellers can be addressed at the distribution level. When tracking and attempting to identify sellers, you will need to start to create a sellers database or spreadsheet. You will need to document their storefront link.The URL for the storefront link has a merchant ID that can't be changed, even if they change their storefront name. Limiting the number of sellers from the beginning is the ideal option. Unmasking these sellers is often extremely difficult and time consuming. Brands often opt for hiring a service to tracking these sellers down for them.