If you’re a manufacturer who recently decided to start selling your own trademarked brand on Amazon, you may have run into something a little unusual. When you went to put in your brand name as your seller display name “Acme Trading Company” for example, you go the following error:
“Your Display Name is already in use by another merchant. Please choose another.”
According to Amazon policy, your seller display name cannot infringe upon the trademark of another company. However, you’re unable to find any seller on Amazon selling under this name, and when you contact Amazon, they are unable to provide you with any information.
Here’s the situation: If at any point, any seller, currently active or inactive, adds a name to their seller display name, it becomes permanently attached to that account and can no longer be used by any other Amazon seller account. Even if that seller changes it, it does not get “released” to be used by the legitimate owner of the trademark.
This is currently just a flaw of Amazon’s system, but is something that will need to be addressed in order to keep sellers happy. Naturally speaking, if a seller creates a brand and trademarks it, they’ll want to sell under that trademarked seller display name, adding credibility to their listing and legitimizing them as the manufacturer of the product.
View Amazon Guidelines on Seller Display Names
In the meantime, sellers have a few creative options to make work. First, you can use a dash “-” or underscore “_” if your company name is more than one word. In this case, your next best option would be “Acme_Trading_Company”. You can also consider combining the words but still use caps to differentiate the text “AcmeTradingCompany”. Lastly, you can add the corporate status “Inc”, etc, at the end of the display name.
If you’re a seller whose encountered this situation, you may consider contacting seller support and providing feedback regarding the current system. With seller feedback the system is likely to be updated to enable seller display names to be used by their rightful brand owners.