One unfortunate threat lurking in the jungles of the Amazon marketplace is ASIN Piggybacking. An Amazon leecher piggybacker is someone who sells your product — or a knockoff of it — and potentially steals the buybox from you, as well as potentially creating issues with your Amazon fee charges. These rogue listings need to be snuffed out quickly to ensure your own don’t start collecting dust. 

What Exactly Is A Piggyback Listing?

Amazon piggyback listings occur when a competing seller copies your product listing and sets up their own, often selling your product at a lower price or with additional incentives. These sellers will often get the product from the same manufacturer, making their product identical to yours aside from any special branding marks you may have.

Sometimes piggyback listers will go a step further and sell a counterfeit version of your product, but use your ASIN and claim it’s the real thing. This can be dangerous for you because, when people buy this fake, often lower-quality version of your product, they will leave bad reviews on your original listing. Your bad reviews along with their lower prices (and increased sales because of that price) is the winning combination that allows them to steal the buybox from you. This buybox theft is often called hijacking. No matter what you call it, having someone reap the benefits from your hard work really stings.

Another thing that a piggyback lister could possibly do is change the dimensions of the product or the category that show on Amazon.com. This doesn’t seem like a huge deal until that seller is hit with a huge FBA fee because Amazon charges more for heavier products and certain categories.

How Do I Resolve This Issue?

Piggybacking and hijacking can be avoided as long as you keep a close eye on your Seller Central dashboard and product listings each day. This, however, is a time-consuming process that AMZAlert can help with. They provide Amazon leech and piggybacker alerts via text and email notifications, meaning you’ll know right away if someone is stealing your thunder.

Once they have alerted you of the piggybacker, there are a few steps you can take to remedy the problem.

• Send the seller a Cease & Desist Letter. On top of monitoring for hijackers, AMZAlert can automatically send Cease & Desist letters for you with their Rapid Restoration feature. If you’re sending the letter manually, go to the hijacker’s Amazon seller profile and click “ask the seller a question.” Select “other” for the type of inquiry, copy and paste your letter, and submit.
• Wait 24-48 hours for their response.
• If no response comes and their listing is still present, file a complaint with Amazon. To get the desired response from Amazon, you will need to purchase one of the piggy backer’s products and submit pictures to prove that what they are selling is counterfeit or fake. That way, you can prove that the leech is falsely advertising.
• Once Seller Performance has taken down the piggyback listing, you can return the products you bought for a full refund under the reason “counterfeit.”

These steps work best for piggybackers selling counterfeit products. The best way to prevent piggybackers who sell legitimate products is to get your brand registered with Amazon and to create your own website. That way, you can sell your products on your own turf.

Protect yourself from Amazon ASIN piggybacking. Sign up for AMZAlert.

In addition to monitoring your listings for piggybackers, leeches, and hijackers, AMZAlert offers a whole host of other feature to make your Amazon Seller account the best that it can be. Their text alerts and email notifications take away the stress of constantly checking in on your account, saving you loads of time (and headaches). Meet and exceed your bottom line with AMZAlert! They have even decided to offer 50% off of their services with coupon code “AMZ50OFF” when signing up! Click Here for 10 Day Free Trial