A White House plan to narrow a trade loophole could mean painful times ahead for Chinese sellers on platforms such as Temu and Shein — and higher prices for U.S. consumers.
That particular strain of nonsense is actually specifically an Amazon thing, because you cannot sell “non branded” merchandise on Amazon, a policy that’s in place allegedly to combat generic whitebox goods from flooding the site. Your product has to be sold under a registered trademark, but the loophole is that said trademark does not actually have to make any sense whatsoever.
Now there are brokers who will assist anyone in registering a trademark that is literally just a random string of letters for this express purpose. All you have to do is concoct a combination that no one has used yet, and register it with the USPTO.
Therefore the entire scheme falls flat on its face, and manifestly fails to make any impact in the problem it purports to solve. But it does probably give Amazon a legal escape hatch to accusations of being a dumping ground for Chinese knockoff products, because they can point to all those trademark registrations and say, “No, see, everything sold here is all totally from a 100% legitimate brand!”
That particular strain of nonsense is actually specifically an Amazon thing, because you cannot sell “non branded” merchandise on Amazon, a policy that’s in place allegedly to combat generic whitebox goods from flooding the site. Your product has to be sold under a registered trademark, but the loophole is that said trademark does not actually have to make any sense whatsoever.
Now there are brokers who will assist anyone in registering a trademark that is literally just a random string of letters for this express purpose. All you have to do is concoct a combination that no one has used yet, and register it with the USPTO.
Therefore the entire scheme falls flat on its face, and manifestly fails to make any impact in the problem it purports to solve. But it does probably give Amazon a legal escape hatch to accusations of being a dumping ground for Chinese knockoff products, because they can point to all those trademark registrations and say, “No, see, everything sold here is all totally from a 100% legitimate brand!”