When shopping online, many users want to know who they are buying from. Retail giant Amazon has created an opaque network of private labels. TECHBOOK found out what it’s all about.
Not only independent dealers sell their products on Amazon. You can also find numerous so-called Amazon brands on the platform. TECHBOOK has found out what this is all about and how buyers can recognize it.
First indications of Amazon brands
Users can narrow their search for a product to Amazon own brands using the Our Brands filter. There you will find well-known names such as “Amazon Basics”, “Echo”, “Kindle” and “Amazon Essentials”. These can be clearly identified as Amazon’s own brands. However, in between there are also names like “Umi”, “Bofute” and “Haylou”. The latter can also be found under “Our brands”. There is, however, a clear difference.
Amazon brand is not the same as Amazon brand
There are two types of Amazon brands, as TECHBOOK learned from business circles. These differ as follows:
Amazon IP (genuine Amazon own brands)
Amazon only actually registers some of the brands itself. In this case one speaks of Intellectual Property (IP) – Amazon’s own intellectual property. The company has registered these brands itself in the commercial register, so they are 100 percent subsidiary brands. They are managed as “trademarks”, are self-financed by Amazon and are under its supervision. When we talk about real Amazon own brands, we mean Amazon IPs.
Amazon Exclusives
In addition to its own trademarks, Amazon also counts exclusives among its own brands. These are brands that have been registered by third-party companies but sell exclusively on Amazon. We have heard from corporate circles that companies such as startups can apply for Amazon’s accelerator program. The benefit for smaller businesses is that it gives them direct access to sales, a store page, and sales metrics. Marketing support and even placements on the Amazon main page and in the product search are also possible with good product ratings. Plus, Amazon Exclusives get free Vine reviews from members of the secret club.
The advantage for Amazon is that the Exclusive Brands only offer their products on the Amazon website. The online giant is thus expanding its own IPs with a whole range of additional brands.
How can I find out which brands belong to Amazon?
So how can Amazon customers find out how many brands actually belong to Amazon and which also come directly from Amazon? Amazon itself only offers the option of filtering individual product searches.
Amazon itself does not keep a complete public list of which brands belong to the company. There is at least a list of them on Amazon.de Trademarks belonging to the company. Also one on Amazon.com digital storefront, on which some trademarks are registered. There are also links to specific shopping categories that you can only search for Amazon Brands. Another trick that can help detect it is a browser extension for Google Chrome. The “Amazon Brand Detector‘ highlights products on the Amazon page in orange to mark them as belonging to the business.
However, this is not a complete overview of all brands that belong to Amazon. However, through a little experimentation, TECHBOOK found a way to do just that. We found the tag that Amazon uses to tag its own products on the Amazon.de page. Converting this tag to a web link allows the shopping page to be searched for Amazon Brands only. This can be recognized by the fact that the category “Our brands”, which is otherwise hidden, appears next to the search field. You can see how this works in our short explanatory video:
You can find the hidden category by following this link: https://www.amazon.de/s?srs=14706515031.
Distinguish between Amazon IPs and Exclusives
But how can you tell whether the products come from Amazon itself or from third parties? Amazon couldn’t give us an answer to this question either. So we did our own research. In Germany, trademarks have to be registered with the German Patent and Trademark Office (DPMA). With the search function of the commercial register, it is relatively easy to find out which company registered a specific trademark.
For example, searching for the “Pinzon” trademark at the DPMAthat it was registered by Amazon Europe Core S.à rl. This is consistent with the fact that “Pinzon” also appears in the Amazon trademark list. If you search instead for the brand “Bofute”, which appears in the hidden category “Our brands”, you get a different result. Here you can DPMA entry see that the brand comes from a Chinese company.
Conclusion: More transparency from Amazon desirable
Unfortunately, Amazon is very reserved when it comes to its own brands on the shopping site. As a result, it can happen that users buy from a brand of the US company without knowing it. TECHBOOK found ways to find Amazon Brands. And not only that: with a little research, every user can find out whether it is a private label or an Amazon exclusive brand.
Nevertheless, we would like to see more transparency from Amazon to better label the brands on the site. This allows customers to be certain of who they are buying from when shopping online. This not only includes labeling each own brand as such – but also distinguishing between the registered brands of Amazon itself and Amazon Exclusives.