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Q&A: I’ve received a patent infringement take down request, what should I do?

Chances are? Nothing.

Right around 4th quarter I receive a number of fake patent infringement letters telling me that my product is a fake, which is insanely ironic and annoying.

Here’s an email I received through buyer-seller messaging at the end of October.

Here’s a more convincing one I received directly to my email, a few weeks later.   It even comes from a very real seeming Amazon address (I haven’t bothered to check to see if they’re spoofing it or what. Or maybe the Seller Performance Team knows it’s not an actionable complaint but passes the message along)

The thing is, I know this product doesn’t infringe on any patents, so I simply ignored them.

Why would anyone send fake cease and desist letters?  Because a lot of people won’t know any better, and there’s money at stake.

Sales for this product were pretty great yesterday, I can understand why someone wanted less competition


In summary. Don’t infringe on people’s patents, but don’t believe someone just because they’re telling you that you’re infringing on someone’s patents.

Amazon will take your listing down if you _actually_ infringe, they don’t need your help to do it.

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Q&A: Why are there ASINs in my Search Term Reports?

Here’s a good question I get from time to time, with a lot of wrong answers being given.

Here’s an easy way to understand why something shows up in your Search Term Reports.

If a user is looking at [X] and they click on your ad, [X] will show up in your search term reports.

So, if a user is looking at “Amazon’s search results for the word ‘pickle juicer'” and they click on your ad, you will see “pickle juicer” in your search term reports.

Stupidly I picked the word pickle juicer before testing to see if there were actually ads on it. There aren’t. Pretend there are.

However, what happens if a user doesn’t pick on your ad (just pretend there is one) and they click on that first pickle juicer which is actually a pickle fork because there’s no such thing as a pickle juicer, work with me.

If they scroll down because this isn’t a pickle juicer they want and they see YOUR product down among the related products, and then click on it, Amazon treats this product page the same way it would a search result, and says “Well, a shopper was looking at this, and then went to your product, so you should know.  Their ASIN is X.”

Okay I’ll just Negative Exact Match them.

According to this Amazon Employee, you can not Block ASINs, nor can you negative exact match them.

So. To recap:

1. If a shopper is looking at search term results, and clicks on your product, you will see a search term in your reports.

2. If a shopper is looking at an asin (a product), and clicks on your product, you will see an ASIN.

3. If a user is looking at the sun, and they click on your ad, well… Sunglasses are a small product, nice markup, light weight, but with a lot of competition. I wouldn’t recommend it.

If you’d like to find an international product, and 3x your Amazon business, click here.

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Cheers,

Phil