Amazon has a working system regarding the ownership and contributions of the listing in the catalog, which I like to call Amazon Contribution Rights.
The first thing that sellers need to know is that when a seller or vendor creates a new listing in the catalog, the system automatically assigns an ASIN to the item, making this listing Amazon's property.
This means that even though the seller or vendor owns the copyright of the information given, Amazon will always be the owner of the listing and that they reserve the right to change its information at any time, indifferently of the fact that sellers and vendors are the controllers of their listings.
The reason for it is that Amazon wishes to provide the best shopping experience possible by having the most amount of information about the product of interest.
With our experience in working with Amazon's catalog, we learned that the Contribution Rights are a point-based, zero to a hundred system that works like a pyramid with a hierarchy. With the highest contributors at the top and going down from there.
The structure of the pyramid is: at the bottom, with the least amount of contribution points, there are sellers. In the middle, we have the vendor or 1P, and on top, with the most amount of points, we have Amazon itself or what we call the internal team.
Between each link of the pyramid, we can find Amazon's teams helping sellers and vendors with their changes. The bottom of the pyramid (the seller's link) can be divided into two: sellers with and without Brand Registry.
Even though the seller or vendor owns the copyright of the information given, Amazon will always be the owner of the listing and that they reserve the right to change its information at any time, indifferently of the fact that sellers and vendors are the controllers of their listings.
At the bottom of the pyramid are sellers without Brand Registry. These sellers can sell their products on Amazon but their contribution will be based on a point system where the seller with the highest score will control the product detail page.
Some factors taken into account with this group are:
This is the team in charge of helping sellers without a brand registered to make changes in their listings, they have limited power when a brand is controlling the listing.
The next group is sellers with Brand Registry. They own their product detail pages and when creating new listings, they have control of it because they already have a trademark for said products.
Here other sellers that want to introduce changes to the detail page of a brand registered product will have a lower priority than the brand owner regarding the control of the information displayed on the listing.
This is the team that manages listings for sellers with a brand registry. Their role and tasks are exactly the same as the Catalog Team with the difference of their internal contribution points. If you want to contact them the only way to do it is through email.
The third group that is closer to the top is Amazon Vendors. They are first-party sellers, meaning that they provide to Amazon by selling their products directly to them, and if a customer purchases from a vendor, the product page will specify if it's in Stock, Shipped, and sold by amazon.com
Seeing that they're like Amazon, Vendors will have high priority in the catalog contribution rights. This means that they'll have priority over any other seller and their contributions will go directly to the Amazon Retail Team.
It's important to know that even if a seller has Brand Registry and owns the trademark for the brand Vendors can change the listings.
They have complete control of any listing on Amazon's marketplace and have duties such as managing and supervising all edits made by Amazon Vendors, helping them during the process, and being the representative of Amazon as a catalog member; this is the reason their changes stick permanently, also that there's no intermediary between them and the listings which make the editing process faster.
The final group at the top of the hierarchy is the Amazon internal team.
Here we can find:
Another way of managing the contribution rights of all sellers is by distributing and hierarchizing according to the Detail Page Control ranking, this is the system that controls all suggested edits to Amazon's catalog that are made by sellers.
This works by supervising and regulating any edit made by a seller without and with brand registry, the only difference will be regarding the team that will be managing those edits (Amazon Catalog Team and Brand Registry Team).
Finally, if a seller wants to apply any changes to a listing these teams will look over that case and will be prepared to help any seller that needs help editing listings in Amazon's catalog and can apply control over the product page.
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