• English

27.08.2024 | by Lili

 

Made-for-Amazon brand names explained

 


Highlights

 

  • Chinese factory-direct sellers often use a meaningless combination of letters as brand names on Amazon
  • These pseudo-brands tend to sell cheap, generic and highly trendy items while maximising Amazon’s algorithm  
  • IP infringing products are often featured on pseudo-brands’ product catalogues

 

 

Choosing a brand name is an important step for most businesses. After all, your name is the essential representative of what your brand stands for. At least, that’s the case for traditional branding. But lately, a new market segment is emerging where an actual brand name may be secondary to other factors.

 

Meet the businesses that only sell cheap, in-demand products on Amazon.

 

 

Random letters as a brand name

Do you know the brands LOOKFACE and SweatyRocks? What about WNEEDU or EUYZOU? While their names may not sound familiar, chances are you’ve already seen their products on Amazon. How come?

 

The strategy of these brands is to produce in-demand products for a low price, then use Amazon’s algorithm to gather as much traction with potential customers as possible. They are especially successful in market segments where brand loyalty is low. It’s easy to see why: when customers aren’t specifically looking for a branded product but just a plain regular thing, brands like EUYZOU see their chance.

 

 

How does it work

When a consumer searches for a generic term like “women’s shirts”, Amazon gathers and lists the results based on its algorithm’s specific criteria. Take a look at the first page of over 60,000 results below.

 

 

Screenshot of random search results on amazon.com

Screenshot of random search results on amazon.com

 

 

As you can see, the first eight results feature brands like YSYOKOW, AUTOMET and Dokotoo (all highlighted in purple on the screenshot). Some of them are even sponsored (highlighted in orange), which indicates that besides taking advantage of the algorithm itself, these brands don’t shy away from investing in Amazon products campaigns.

 

With such a selling strategy, your actual brand name may not be important as such, especially if you’re not aiming for long-term brand loyalty or reputation. Which means that racking your brains to come up with a good brand name could be a waste of time. In cases like this, even a random brand name generator could do.

 

Consequently, basic garments like T-shirts, socks and loungewear are very popular with these brands. Consumers looking for cheap everyday items may be tempted to go for a nine-euro tank top instead of a forty-euro one, even if the former is sold by SweatyRocks. After all, nobody is going to see the label.

 

 

Screenshot of a random product listing on https://www.amazon.com/

Screenshot of a random product listing on https://www.amazon.com/

 

 

Most of these brands are based in China and work on a factory-direct basis. They often offer Prime advantages to customers including fast and free shipping, further enticing them to place an order.

 

Find out all about Amazon’s Buy with Prime initiative.

 

 

Branding vs selling

Although these companies don’t use traditional branding for attracting customers, market analysts point out that they do use a brand, just not their own.

 

When shopping on Amazon, customers rarely care what the third party seller they’re buying from is actually called. Many of them probably don’t even notice that they’re not buying from Amazon itself. This is also due to the fact that Amazon’s Buy Box system doesn’t exactly make it easy for customers to learn more about the seller or find other merchants offering the same listing.

 

Learn how Amazon’s Buy Box system works!

 

Sellers like EUYZOU have noticed this phenomenon and use it to their maximum advantage. Consequently, Amazon does all the branding, and these sellers can focus on looking for the next hit product, and on fine-tuning their keywords to create as much traction with the algorithm as possible.

 

 

Related topics

Amazon takes action against fake IP infringement claims

 

What is a third party seller?

 

Seller verifications and how they favour anonymity on various marketplaces

 

 

Product strategies

Businesses behind these “pseudo-brands” like WNEEDU and Dokotoo usually don’t tie themselves to a single product category. In fact, they watch the market closely and jump on the next high-yielding trend that makes consumers swarm Amazon.

 

It may be smart scales today, ergonomic pillows tomorrow. However, if consumers start associating a brand name with a specific product category, it may become more difficult to move on to the next Amazon craze when the time is right. Which is why weird, non-memorable brand names may be the best to allow businesses to flexibly switch between product categories. (Or alternatively, becoming a giant all-around marketplace that offers every imaginable kind of knick-knacks for a bargain price. Sounds familiar, Temu?)

 

Latching on to the latest trends and flooding the market with cheap, fashionable products? Pseudo-brands are not the only ones using this strategy.

 

Discover how faster-than-fast-fashion company SHEIN conquers the market!

 

 

Trademark registrations - and infringements

Selling in a foreign territory often requires sellers to register their business and/or trademarks before they can set up shop in the new market.

 

Choosing a unique brand name may be helpful for this process; as national authorities need to check the pending registration against existing ones, it helps if your brand name is dissimilar to anything that’s ever been registered before.

 

And, a pseudo-brand name you haven’t spent years building is much easier to abandon, should the need arise. For example, if you’ve been caught selling IP infringing products on Amazon.

 

 

Funny brand names and online brand protection

The choice of brand names, however unusual, is not really the concern of online brand protection experts. We examine what they sell. And unfortunately, we’ve seen quite a few IP infringing products popping up amongst the listings of these brands.

 

Counterfeiters rarely call themselves FAKESELLERS. (Oh, how easy would it be to recognise fake products!) Luckily, we at globaleyez don’t need such visual clues to catch fraudsters.

 

Take our marketplace monitoring service, for instance. Whatever the brand has decided to call itself, our state-of-the-art software tool traxster finds any potentially IP infringing product listings on Amazon and on over 150 other online marketplaces worldwide. With versatile filter options, we can discard authorised listings and focus on the ones that infringe on your IP rights.

 

Not all fraudsters cause the same amount of harm. Indeed, the ones that sell one or two products per month don’t inflict nearly as much damage on your brand as the ones selling thousands of items every day. Therefore, our marketplace sales tracking service is essential to determine which sellers to act against immediately, and which ones can wait.

 

Since fake sellers often rely on stolen or copied pictures to sell their goods, our image monitoring service is perfect to catch fraudulent ads and product listings on single webshops, social media platforms or anywhere else online.

 

Sometimes it’s essential to learn more about a specific seller or product (especially when all we have is a brand name like NSEOWIGN). In cases like this, we recommend a test purchase to discover as much as possible about the seller and the origins of a product.

 

Finally, we’ll be more than happy to enforce your rights and demand the removal of any infringing listings and images from Amazon or anywhere else online.

 

 

Conclusion

Pseudo-brands use a legitimate marketing strategy to catch the attention of Amazon shoppers. However, sometimes they do much worse things than come up with astonishing names.

 

Don’t let pseudo-brands (or anyone else) infringe on your IP rights! Contact us and let’s create an effective online brand protection strategy for your brand.