Walmart Brand Portal: How does it compare to Amazon Brand Registry?

The $1 million (or more) question: Will Walmart’s new Brand Portal tool operate as well as (or even better than) Amazon’s Brand Registry tool?

Well, the returns are not in yet. It’s very early to make that determination. But what we are able to look at right now are the features each tool presents. Let’s walk through a few of the most noticeable features to compare the basic uses of each marketplace’s platform. 

Access Protection Platform Through Seller Account

Both platforms allow sellers to log in through a single point of access—your seller account (either Seller Central or Seller Center)--and operate both the seller side of things as well as the brand protection platform.

This is key to the functionality of both platforms so as to allow sellers to keep their brand protection efforts top-of-mind as they monitor their sales performance day-to-day.

Easily Select the Type of Claim You Need to Submit

While both platforms allow you to select from a dropdown list of intellectual property claims, Walmart Brand Portal provides “counterfeit” as one of the options, while Amazon’s Brand Registry has a more generic “other” option through which counterfeit concerns are submitted.

The ability to quickly funnel a claim through the “counterfeit” avenue in Brand Portal is an advantage so as to allow the Walmart enforcement team to know the nature of the claim without needing to analyze the evidence provided.

One-Stop-Shop for Monitoring Cases

Both Amazon’s Brand Registry and Walmart’s Brand Portal allow users to track the status of claims submitted in an in-account dashboard. The ability to view the open cases and see the progress of each is a benefit that is essential to establishing trust between the sellers and the marketplaces.

It will be interesting to monitor the responsiveness of Walmart to the claims filed by sellers as this new Brand Portal is used more and more by sellers. A common complaint with Brand Registry is that Amazon is not very responsive to claims that may not seem either severe or unique.

Overall, we expect Brand Portal to operate in much the same way as Amazon’s Brand Registry tool, but as Brand Portal grows and sellers have more experience with the platform, it is worth gauging the success of this new Walmart initiative.

If you’d like to learn more about how Blue Wheel partners with brands to protect their presence online, connect with our team of Amazon experts.