Amazon Brand Registry is the most complete brand protection program in ecommerce, and it covers exactly one marketplace. We start every brand protection review by asking which enforcement programs a brand is enrolled in. On most $200K+/month brands the answer is “Brand Registry.” On a meaningful number of them, the trademark behind that enrollment is a pending application that no other major marketplace will accept.
That doesn’t matter much in March. It matters a lot in November, when counterfeiters and grey-market sellers follow traffic. They go where traffic is rising and enforcement is weakest, and for most Amazon-first brands that’s any marketplace where the brand has never registered.
This post covers where Brand Registry’s protection ends, what the other three programs need, and the one-afternoon check to run before October.
The pending trademark asymmetry
Amazon now broadly accepts pending trademark applications for Brand Registry, as long as the application was filed with a supported IP office and has a serial number. Brands can enroll months or years before a registration issues. That’s good policy, and plenty of brands used it.
Walmart’s program works differently. According to Walmart’s own Brand Portal guide:
- The mark must be fully registered with the USPTO, with a seven-digit registration number and active status
- An eight-digit serial number means the application is pending, and pending marks aren’t eligible
- WIPO and EUIPO marks aren’t accepted
- Applicants must be based in one of a listed set of countries
- Brand owners only. Walmart doesn’t accept applications from third-party sellers or brand protection agencies
So a brand enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry off a 2025 application may have no access to Walmart’s IP claim tools until the USPTO issues its registration. USPTO timelines vary, so check your own application’s status rather than trusting a figure from a blog, including this one. Meanwhile any seller can list against that brand on Walmart, and the brand’s only route is the general IP claim process instead of a portal.
The same gap catches brands whose only registration is European or filed through WIPO. They’re protected on Amazon.com through their Registry enrollment and have no standing in Walmart’s portal.
Check this first: open your trademark record and see which number you have. Seven digits is a registration. Eight is a serial number, meaning pending. Brand managers get that wrong often enough that it’s worth thirty seconds.
What each program actually gives you
The four programs aren’t equivalent, and treating them as interchangeable is how brands end up filing the wrong thing in the wrong place.
Amazon Brand Registry. Report a Violation, automated protections, and Project Zero self-service removal if you qualify. Project Zero is gated by your accuracy record, which we covered in our enforcement accuracy post. It also carries content authority on your listings.
Walmart Brand Portal. Approved brand owners can file copyright, trademark, patent and counterfeit claims. The portal also controls who may act as brand owner on Walmart.com. There’s one Acting Brand Owner per brand, which lets that seller update brand content over other sellers. Authorized Resellers can update content except against the Acting Brand Owner. It usually takes about 24 hours for those privileges to take effect once assigned. That role structure is the part brands miss. On Walmart, whoever holds Acting Brand Owner status controls the brand’s content. If you’ve never enrolled, nobody has assigned that role deliberately.
TikTok Shop IP Protection Center (IPPC). Brand owners upload IP documents, file and track infringement complaints, and see moderation decisions. TikTok Shop also requires brand authorization to list trademarked products. Sellers apply in the Qualification Center as trademark owner, first- or second-level authorized seller, or licensee, and have to submit matching documents. That creates a queue of sellers claiming to be authorized to sell your brand, and somebody on your side needs to be reviewing it. On TikTok, abuse also shows up in livestreams and creator videos, not just listings, which is a different monitoring job than an Amazon hijacker sweep.
eBay VeRO. Rights owners register and file a Notice of Claimed Infringement for each case, certifying ownership and a good-faith belief of infringement. Removal is commonly reported within about a day of a valid notice. It’s the oldest and most manual of the four, and it’s where a lot of used, grey-market and outright counterfeit units of popular Amazon products end up.
Why it costs more in Q4
Three things happen together in October and November.
Traffic rises on every channel at once. Walmart’s holiday season starts earlier than Amazon’s and runs its extended return policy from October 1. TikTok Shop runs its own fall promotional calendar. Bad actors go after demand, and demand is everywhere.
Enforcement pressure on Amazon pushes abuse elsewhere. A brand with Project Zero and automated protections on Amazon is expensive to counterfeit there. The same product on a marketplace where the brand isn’t enrolled costs nothing to counterfeit. Sellers who get removed on one channel often reappear on another within weeks.
Shared item pages carry the damage. On Walmart, multiple sellers can sell against the same item page. A counterfeit or damaged unit shipped by an unauthorized seller can produce a one-star review on the page your own offer lives on. On a young Walmart listing with a thin review base, one bad review moves the average far more than it would on an established Amazon listing. We worked through that math in our young listing review cost post.
Here’s a worked example. A brand doing $200K/month on Amazon and $25K/month on Walmart, with 38 reviews at 4.4 on its hero Walmart item. A counterfeit seller joins the page in late October and ships maybe 60 units before anyone notices. If a handful of those buyers leave one- and two-star reviews, the rating drops to a four-star display right as the Walmart peak starts. Say that costs two conversion points on $12K/month of hero-item revenue at 45% contribution. That’s roughly $500–$700 a month for as long as the reviews stay up, which is well past the season. There’s also the cost of reviewing Amazon listings for a spillover complaint, and a counterfeit that looks enough like yours to damage the brand for a gift recipient who never learns the difference.
That’s not catastrophic on one item. The point is that it’s entirely preventable, it needs no ad budget, and it takes an enrollment most brands haven’t done.
The cross-marketplace protection check (one afternoon)
1. Build a four-row table. Rows: Amazon Brand Registry, Walmart Brand Portal, TikTok Shop IPPC, eBay VeRO. Columns: enrolled yes/no, the trademark record used (registration or serial number, jurisdiction), the entity name on the enrollment, and who in your business can log in. An empty cell is a finding.
2. Check your trademark status against each program’s rule. If Amazon is running on a serial number, you already know Walmart is closed to you. Check the USPTO record for the office action history and expected timing, and diary the registration date. The week it issues, the Walmart Brand Portal application should go in.
3. Match the entity names. The USPTO owner, the Brand Registry rights owner, and the name on the Walmart and TikTok applications should be the same legal entity, or the difference should be documented. A trademark held by a founder personally or a holding company and enrolled under an operating company is a mismatch that slows every application. It’s the same problem as the GS1 mismatch, in a different database.
4. Search your brand on each marketplace today and screenshot the results with the date. Who’s selling it? Are the offers yours, authorized, or neither? Are there listings using your photography? That’s your baseline, and in November you’ll want to compare against it instead of your memory.
5. Assign the roles deliberately. On Walmart, decide who holds Acting Brand Owner. On TikTok Shop, name the person who reviews brand authorization requests and give them a response standard. On eBay, keep a NOCI template ready so the first case in December isn’t also the first time anyone reads the form.
6. Use one routing sheet across all four. The routing lesson from Amazon applies everywhere. Unauthorized isn’t the same as infringing. A genuine unit sold by a seller you didn’t approve is a distribution problem. Filing a trademark or counterfeit claim against it is how you build a record of rejected complaints, on Amazon or anywhere else. Map each situation (counterfeit, image copyright, brand name misuse, unauthorized reseller, used sold as new) to the right claim type per platform. Put the platforms side by side on one page.
7. Name one owner across all channels. Not the Amazon manager for Amazon and whoever runs Walmart for Walmart. Enforcement records attach to the brand, not the channel team, and a counterfeiter moving between channels is one problem with one owner.
What good looks like
A brand that’s done this can answer three questions in under a minute: which marketplaces it can file an IP claim on today, which trademark record each enrollment uses, and who reviews TikTok authorization requests. Most brands we audit can answer the first for Amazon only, the second not at all, and have never heard of the third.
FAQ
Does Walmart Brand Portal require us to sell on Walmart?
Walmart’s guidance doesn’t make you an existing Marketplace seller to register a brand. Enrolling before you launch there, or even if you never launch, gives you standing to file claims against sellers listing your brand. Confirm the current terms when you apply.
Our trademark is pending. Is there anything we can do on Walmart now?
You can still use Walmart’s general IP claim process, which is slower and has no portal tools. The practical steps are to keep the USPTO application moving, answer office actions fast, and file the Brand Portal application the week the registration issues.
Is TikTok Shop brand authorization the same as IPPC enrollment?
No. Brand authorization is how sellers prove the right to list your trademarked product. IPPC is where you, as owner, register your IP and file complaints. You need both working: authorizations so your own and approved sellers can list, and IPPC so you can act against the ones who shouldn’t.
Can our agency enroll us?
Walmart explicitly doesn’t accept Brand Portal applications from third-party sellers or brand protection agencies, so the brand owner has to apply. An agency can help prepare documents and, once you’re enrolled, may be given a delegated role. The enrollment and the record belong to you.
We only sell on Amazon. Does this apply?
Yes, arguably more. Your product’s traffic and reviews make it attractive to list elsewhere, and a brand with no presence on other channels has nobody watching what appears there under its name. The eBay and Walmart searches in step four take ten minutes and usually settle the question.
If you’re looking for a team that manages every lever — creative, advertising, and operations — Velocity Sellers works with brands doing $100K+/month on Amazon. Contact us for a free account audit.
