The dashboard
Trademark checks
How the create page checks your listing copy for trademarks, what the four marks mean, and the lists you keep in Settings.
On Amazon's create page, MerchPPC checks the phrases of your brand, title and bullets for trademarks and marks them in the text. It is a search of live marks, not legal advice: it can miss a mark and it cannot tell you whether a use is allowed.
The four marks
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| Solid red, thick underline, bold, with a stop sign | A term on your own trademark list for this marketplace. It outranks the register. |
| Red | A live mark in the register that is the phrase, in the classes of your product types. |
| Amber | Worth a look: a single word that is a mark, or a live mark that contains the phrase. |
| Dotted green line and a tick | A phrase you looked into and marked Checked, no mark. |
Words from your Words to warn me about list are flagged the same way as the built-in prohibited terms; see Settings. Press a marked phrase to see the marks behind it: wordmark, status, classes and owner.
Which register checks which marketplace
A panel is checked only against the register that governs its marketplace, never another's.
- Amazon.com: USPTO.
- Amazon.de, .fr, .it and .es: EUIPO.
- Amazon.co.uk: UK IPO.
- Amazon.co.jp: no register of its own here yet.
The check answers from MerchPPC's own copy of each register, which the site fills in the background. Where the site holds no copy yet, the check says "The trademark check is not available yet." and draws nothing under the fields. It does not draw a clean result it did not read.
What is sent, and what is not kept
To check a phrase the extension sends that phrase and the register's name to merchppc.com. The site looks it up in its own copy and answers. The phrase is not kept: it is not written to a table, a job, a log or an error report. Nothing else from the listing goes with it, and your sales, ads and designs stay in your browser.
Your lists, in Settings → Create page
- Your trademark list. Terms you know are somebody's mark, one per line, each listed for the marketplaces you choose (none chosen means all) with an optional note. The create page marks them in red, and a batch is checked against them before a product enters the Publish queue. The list is kept in this browser and never uploaded.
- Checked, no mark. The phrases you cleared from a result, per marketplace. Forget removes one.
- Words to warn me about. Words always flagged, even if you allowed them.
- Words you have allowed. Built-in prohibited words you no longer want flagged.
- Built-in list. The prohibited terms the create page already checks; it can be opened and read in the same place.
Restoring Settings does not wipe these lists.
See also Creating on Merch and Nothing reaches Amazon without your approval.