HELP!!! I've Been Hijacked!
From time to time we all experience headaches on Amazon. It’s part of the deal that comes along with the privilege of having access to 10’s of millions of active shoppers.
One of the most frustrating situations that we’ve ever encountered on Amazon happened a few years ago when a hijacker took over our listing, shipped inferior products to our customers with long lead times, and caused a flood of 1-star reviews. As you can imagine, this mess took a long time and much perseverance from our team to fix.
The good news is that once the dust settled, we were introduced to a new program (at the time) called Transparency...and we have NEVER dealt with another hijacker again. In fact, I am so confident in the Transparency program that I feel like one of those guys who owns a credit protection company and puts their social security number in their radio ads. I would gladly do the same with our UPC’s now that we have the security of Transparency!
Let’s start from the beginning...
In the course of shopping on Amazon for a product for our kids, my wife discovered a hole. It seemed that nobody offered exactly what we were looking for. Being parents ourselves to toddlers and having a lot of friends who are parents of toddlers - we strongly believed that such a product would do well on Amazon.
So, we decided to source it and sell it ourselves!
Because this was a seasonal product, it was really hard to forecast inventory. Go too big and you’re at risk of having to pull the inventory out of Amazon, find a place to store it during the off-season, and ship it back in for next year’s selling season. Go too small and you’re leaving money on the table and potentially allowing for a competitor to come in and overtake you with more reviews and algorithm juice.
Long story short, we went too small and what ended up happening was much worse than our original fears above.
The moment we went out of stock, a hijacker jumped on the listing and as I mentioned above, they were sending customers VERY low quality product and shipping from China with around a 6-week lead time. We started getting a ton of 1-star reviews, negative seller feedback, and messages from frustrated parents who needed to receive the product fast.
A couple of important learnings for us thus far in the story:
We thought we were safe because our brand is “Brand Gated”. If you aren’t familiar with this term, it’s something Amazon used to grant to top sellers, but it has since been replaced by Brand Registry. Brand Gated meant that absolutely nobody could send in products with our UPC’s or sell on our listings - so we were safe. What we failed to realize is that for our brand, Brand Gating only applied to the clothing category. Our new product was NOT clothing, and therefore was vulnerable.
The second learning is that you can beg and plead and send email after email after email to seller support and brand registry. But they absolutely WILL NOT remove the hijacker until you purchase the counterfeit product yourself, take pictures showing that it’s not the real deal, and provide this evidence in your correspondence and pleas. This was especially painful for us because the seller would only ship from China the slowest available way. So we had to wait about 6 weeks while the hijacker continued to enrage our customers and cause great harm to our listing and overall account health.
As you can imagine, everyday that went by was more painful and frustrating for us. After about a week of waiting for the counterfeit shipment, I decided to take action. Because the listing was still showing in our Seller Central account, I was able to go in and edit the copy, plus the hero and secondary images. I updated the copy and images so they had large bold text communicating NOT to purchase and that the listing is currently hijacked and only counterfeit merchandise is being shipped. This gave us some small satisfaction.
The selling season came and went. The good news was that we sold through all of our inventory in record time and next year would be GREAT, the bad news was that it took us several weeks to get rid of the hijacker and due to the 1-star reviews the listing was in rough shape with about a 3-star average.
We are lucky to have an amazing team who were able to work with Amazon to get almost all of the 1-star reviews removed, but what happened next was the best part!
Someone contacted us from Amazon and explained that there was a new program called Transparency and they thought we would be a good fit for it. Once they explained how it worked and what the cost associated was (mere pennies per product), it was a no-brainer for us.
In a nutshell, it works like this:
You enroll your product in the program.
Once you decide the quantity you are shipping in, you request QR codes, have them printed and shipped to your factory.
The factory places these QR code stickers on every package just like the FNSKU.
Once the shipment is sent to the Amazon fulfillment center, the QR code is scanned and the inventory is accepted.
Now the beauty of this is that each QR code is different (like snowflakes!). So, if you order 1,000 pcs, you are getting 1,000 unique codes that must match when Amazon receives and scans in your product. If they do not match or if they have already received the code, Amazon will destroy the shipment! How satisfying is that!?!
So let’s say a hijacker buys your product from Amazon.com counterfeits it, and copies the UPC and Transparency QR codes. Once they try to ship their shipment into Amazon, it will be rejected because the QR code was already received and the entire shipment will be destroyed!
So satisfying and the best part is the peace of mind that we have now knowing that we never have to worry about getting hijacked again!
For more information on the Transparency program and how you can get your products enrolled, contact them directly via their website.