Trademark FAQs
Trademarks give you legal claim over your brand names, slogans, and logos. Trademarks are for protecting brand identity; they do not protect inventions or original works such as art or music. Trademarks give you nationwide protection for your brand. Other sellers will not be able to use your trademarked brand name or logo to sell products, unless it’s with your permission.
We highly recommend word mark. It’s easier and cleaner and best for Amazon. Sometimes Amazon will interpret a design logo mark with slightly different punctuation or spacing. But a word mark gets exact match every time.
Some companies use both a distinctive brand name and logo, so they decide to trademark both. This can be advantageous for certain brands, but both the brand name and the logo would require separate filing, which means double the fees. For this reason, many companies feel that filing a trademark for just their company name provides enough protection.
Trademarks can last indefinitely as long as you continue to use the mark in commerce. A statement of use needs to be filed 5 years after the registration of your trademark.
We run a direct-hit trademark search to make sure that your trademark is not already in use. This saves you the money and trouble of filing and being rejected for “likelihood of confusion”, meaning that your mark is too similar or even identical to an existing trademark. Please be aware that our trademark search is a direct-hit search, and not a comprehensive search.
It can take 6-9 months before your trademark is officially registered. You should receive your initial response from the USPTO within 3 months. You can speed up the process by making sure your application is accurate and responding promptly to any office actions sent to you by the USPTO. Amazon recently started allowing brands to get their brand registry faster with a Pending Trademark and you no longer have to wait until final approval.
No. You can upload to Amazon immediately. You do not need a TM to sell on Amazon. You just need the TM to get the brand registry to get access to A+ content and the brand dashboard. It is wise for you to file the TM now so that over the next few months while your items go through the supply chain you’ll have the TM quicker.
- A USPTO search to make sure the TM will be accepted and isn’t too similar.
- A review of the wording/mark to make sure it passes UPTO requirements.
- The filing of the TM.
- Any responses required from the UPSTO to get the mark approved.
- If you are not actively selling your product, we can create a page for you to clear USPTO requirements.
Within about 7 days. You can go to brandregistry.amazon.com and use the pending TM serial number and file the mark. The fastest we’ve seen is 2 days. But 5-7 days is the average.
A specimen is a real-world example of how you are using your trademark on goods or in the offer of services. A specimen is more than just a picture of your trademark or logo. For goods (products), acceptable specimens include labels, tags, packaging material, instruction manuals and containers that display the trademark. Please note that brochures, business cards, catalogs, and stationery are generally not acceptable specimens for goods. Take a cell phone picture of your product in it’s packaging to submit a specimen to My Amazon Guy.
