Brand Registry, MAP & resellers
An unauthorized seller is a company selling genuine units of your product without your permission. Amazon will not remove them for you, because reselling lawfully acquired goods is not an intellectual property violation, and a complaint filed as if it were will be rejected and can expose you. The response that works runs backwards through your own supply chain: identify which shipment the units came from, find the customer who sold them on, and use your commercial terms.
This is the problem most Amazon brands meet a few months after their first real wholesale order, and it is the one the brand-protection tooling addresses least directly. What follows is the sequence that works, in order, including what to do when the trail goes cold.
First, work out which problem you have
Three different things get called an unauthorized seller, and they need different responses.
A counterfeit. Someone is manufacturing a copy and selling it under your name. This is the one Amazon's tooling is built for, and Project Zero plus the standard infringement reports handle it.
A genuine unit in the wrong hands. Your product, made by you, sold by a company you did not authorize. This is the common case and the subject of this article.
A materially different unit. Genuine product, but altered, expired, repackaged, missing components, or sold without the warranty or support you provide. This sits in between, and it is the case where a trademark argument can sometimes be made, because what is being sold is not the product your mark stands for.
Get this right before you do anything, because the responses diverge completely. Buy a unit. Actually buy it, from the offer in question, and examine what arrives. Almost every good decision downstream depends on having the physical unit in your hands.
Trace the unit back to a shipment
If you serialize, this step takes minutes. The code on the unit maps to a production run, and if you have kept a record of which code ranges went into which purchase orders, the run maps to a customer. The Transparency program covers the mechanics, and the record-keeping half is yours to maintain.
If you do not serialize, you are reading circumstantial evidence, and it is worth more than nothing.
Lot codes and batch numbers on the packaging tell you roughly when the unit was made, which narrows the shipments it could have come from. Packaging revisions do the same: if the unit carries artwork you retired last spring, it came from an older run. Expiry dates on consumables are a date stamp. Case markings sometimes survive on units that were sold by the case.
Then compare against your order history. A brand with eight wholesale customers can usually narrow a run to two or three of them. A brand with eighty cannot, which is an argument for concentration in the early years.
The usual sources, ranked by likelihood
When brands do trace successfully, the answers repeat.
A distributor clearing overstock. They bought more than they moved and sold the balance to a liquidator or an online account. Rarely malicious, and entirely predictable if the initial order was oversized.
A retail account that over-ordered. Same mechanism, smaller scale.
A sub-distributor you never knew existed. Your customer sells to other wholesalers, and two steps down the chain nobody has heard of your policy.
A liquidation lot. Returns, discontinued lines, or a bankruptcy. These units are lawfully owned by whoever bought the lot, and there is usually nothing to do except wait for them to sell through.
Your own returns. Units returned to Amazon and resold as used or through a liquidation channel come back as offers on your listing.
Notice how many of these are consequences of ordinary commerce rather than bad faith. That should shape the tone of the conversation you have next.
Talking to the customer
Once you have a name, the conversation is commercial, and the goal is not an apology.
Open with the specifics: the offer, the unit you bought, the run or lot code, and the purchase order it corresponds to. Specifics change the character of the call, because a distributor who can deny a vague accusation cannot deny a code.
Ask two things. Who did they sell those units to, and will they stop. If your terms include an obligation to identify the buyer, cite it. If they do not, this is the moment you learn why that clause belongs in every agreement from now on.
Then decide. Keep supplying them on tighter terms, reduce the order sizes that create overstock, or stop. Cutting off a paying customer is uncomfortable and it is also the only sanction that is genuinely yours. A policy you never apply is one the channel learns to ignore, which is the argument made at more length in minimum advertised price on Amazon.
What to do about the live offer
While you work upstream, there is a listing with an offer on it. Options, in order of how often they are the right answer.
Wait it out. A liquidator with 200 units sells through in weeks. Fighting it costs more than it saves.
Compete on the listing. You have better costs than anyone reselling your product. Holding the featured offer is usually a matter of price and fulfillment, and it is often the cheapest response.
Check for a material difference. If the unit is expired, altered, repackaged, missing the components you ship, or sold without a warranty you provide, you may have a real argument. Document precisely what differs, with photographs, and take advice before filing anything.
Restrict listing through serialization. Enrolling the ASIN means units without valid codes cannot move through Amazon's fulfillment network. It does not stop a seller with genuine coded units, and what gating can and cannot do is set out in Amazon brand gating.
What is not on the list: filing a counterfeit complaint against genuine goods. It fails, and a seller with invoices can respond with a counter-notice and a demand letter. Brands have lost more from a careless complaint than from the offer they were trying to remove.
Preventing the next one
Everything above is cleanup. The prevention is upstream and mostly unglamorous.
Serialize before the first case ships, and keep the mapping from code range to purchase order. It takes minutes per order and it is the difference between knowing and guessing.
Size orders to what the account can actually sell. Overstock is the origin of most diversion, and a distributor talked into 1,000 units who can move 400 will find somewhere for the other 600.
Write the terms that give you a mechanism: channel restrictions, an obligation to identify onward buyers, an advertised price policy, and a stated consequence. Working with distributors covers what else belongs in the agreement.
Ask the qualifying questions before the first order. What do you do with overstock. Do you sell to online accounts. Do you sell to other wholesalers. These are normal commercial questions and the answers are usually honest.
And choose accounts that fit the product. Most diversion traces back to a customer who was never right in the first place, taken on because they emailed. Paste your listing into WholesalePilot and the preview shows the distributors and retailers that plausibly stock products like yours, which is a better basis for a target list than an inbox.
When the trail goes cold
Sometimes you cannot identify the source. The unit is from an old run, the lot code is ambiguous, or the units came through a liquidation chain with three owners.
Accept it and change what you can control. Put serialization on the next run so the next incident resolves. Tighten order sizes. Review which customers have grown beyond what their business explains, because a distributor whose orders doubled without a matching retail footprint is selling somewhere you have not accounted for.
And keep perspective on the size of the problem. An occasional offer that clears in a month is the normal cost of having a distribution channel. A permanent second offer under your price is a supply problem with a name attached, and it is findable.
Questions brand owners ask
Can I report an unauthorized seller to Amazon? You can report intellectual property violations. Being unauthorized by you is not one, and reporting it as one is the mistake that creates real risk.
Does a reseller need my permission to sell my product? Generally not, once they lawfully own genuine units. Your control is over who you supply, not over what a lawful owner does afterwards.
What if they are damaging my brand with bad service? Document it. Poor handling, missing components, expired stock and absent warranty support are where a material difference argument can start, and it is a question for a lawyer.
Should I just lower my price to push them out? Sometimes, briefly. Permanently repricing your listing to beat a liquidator resets the market's expectation of what your product costs, and that is expensive to undo.
Will more enforcement tooling fix this? No. Tooling operates on listings, and this is a shipment problem. The fix is who you sell to and what your terms say.