Amazon Sellers Struggle to Decipher New Brand Gating Policies
This week, Amazon announced that it has implemented new restrictions for third party sellers who sell major brands on the platform. The new regulations are called brand gating, and it’s causing major uproar in the Amazon community. Now, in order to sell top brand names – even if the products are 100% compliant, authentic and brand new – many sellers must pay an exorbitant rate just to get approval to list these items.
According to the Seattle Times, Nike is valuable enough for Amazon to charge sellers $1500 for a chance to sell these items on the platform. Other brands with high fees according to the new brand gating policies include Adidas, Hasbro, Microsoft, Pokemon and Lego.
Brand gating has been implemented by Amazon very suddenly, without any notice for sellers. These new regulations are all part of a larger effort to tighten restrictions on selling top brands for independent Amazon sellers, and ultimately, control who exactly is selling these brands. Brand gating limitations arose from a recent spike in counterfeit items on the marketplace, which resulted in many major name brands like Birkenstock removing their products from Amazon.com. Regardless, it is evident that Amazon is shifting their focus away from individual sellers and towards major brands.
“We want customers to be able to shop with confidence on Amazon,” stated Amazon spokesperson Erik Fairleigh. “For certain products and categories, Amazon requires additional performance checks, other qualification requirements, and fees.”
What Brand Gating Means for Private Label Sellers
Because of these new restrictions, some sellers have found that they’ve been barred from selling their own brands. This week, many private label brand owners have reported that they must obtain approval even to sell their own products on Amazon.com
The positive aspect of the new brand gating regulations for private label sellers is that it will be much easier to hinder counterfeiting and hijacking on Amazon. This is certainly an upside, but at last weeks’ SCOE conference in Seattle, Amazon sellers were up in arms about this situation, stating that account suspensions, policy warnings and buyer complaints have skyrocketed already. Unfortunately, this is yet another “David and Goliath” occurrence that only further solidifies Amazon’s dominance in every market.