Selling Online? A Trademark Checklist

If you sell online, your brand name is doing more work than it does in a shop. It is your listing title, your storefront, your handle, and the thing a marketplace matches against when it decides whether a counterfeit listing comes down. Almost every enforcement tool a platform gives you is gated behind one thing: a registered trademark.

This is the order to do it in. Nine steps, from picking a name you can own through to taking down a copycat listing.

1. Clear the Name Before You Print Anything

Check the name before you buy packaging, register the domain, or pay a designer. A clash found now costs nothing. The same clash found after launch can mean changing the name.

A proper clearance is more than typing the name into a register. It covers exact matches, names that sound the same, names that mean the same thing, similar logos, and unregistered names already trading in your category. Domain and handle availability is a separate check, and a name being free on Instagram tells you nothing about whether it is free on the register.

Start with a free trademark check. If it comes back clean and the stakes are high, go deeper before you file.

2. Pick a Name You Can Protect

Not every name is registrable. Strength runs on a spectrum:

• Invented words such as Kodak. Strongest.
• Dictionary words used somewhere unexpected, such as Apple for computers. Also strong.
• Suggestive names that hint at what you do without describing it. Registrable, and they take a little imagination from the customer.
• Descriptive names that state a quality of the product. Hard to register, and hard to enforce against competitors using the same ordinary words.
• Generic names, the common word for the thing itself. Never registrable.

Sellers reach for descriptive names because they help with search. That is a trade-off, and it is worth making deliberately rather than by accident. A common compromise is a distinctive brand name with descriptive words in the listing title, not in the trademark.

3. Pick Classes for What You Sell

Trademark rights are granted for specific goods and services, sorted into 45 international classes. Getting this right is what decides whether your registration covers the thing a counterfeiter is copying.

Classes that come up constantly for online sellers:

• The class covering the product itself: clothing, cosmetics, furniture, leather goods, electronics, and so on.
• Class 35 for retail and online retail services. This is the one you need if you run a marketplace or sell other people's goods, not just your own.
• Class 9 for software and downloadable digital products.
• Class 42 for software as a service.

Filing in too many classes wastes money and can attract challenges. Filing in too few leaves a gap exactly where you will need cover. Class Assist walks through the choice, and our pricing page shows what each extra class adds.

4. Decide: Word Mark, Logo, or Both

The word mark protects the name itself, in any font, any color. It is the broader right and it is what platform brand programs match against most reliably.

A logo registration protects that specific image. It is worth having when the logo is doing its own work as an identifier, but a small change to your own logo can leave the registration behind.

For most sellers the sequence is: register the word mark first, add the logo later if it earns it.

5. File Before You Scale

File in your home country first. That filing date is also your priority date, which means for six months afterward you can file in other countries and be treated as if you had filed there on the same day. That six-month window is the cheapest time to plan your international coverage.

Government fees at the main offices:

• USPTO: $350 per class. There is one base application now, since 18 January 2025. The old TEAS Plus and TEAS Standard options no longer exist.
• EUIPO: 850 euro for one class, 50 euro for the second, 150 euro for each further class. One filing covers all 27 member states of the European Union.
• UKIPO: 205 pounds for one class, 60 pounds for each further class.

Those are government fees only. Professional fees are separate, and our pricing page shows the Total per country.

Expect a United States application to take the better part of a year, and longer if an examiner raises an objection or someone opposes. That is the reason to file early: the queue does not care about your launch date.

6. File in the Countries That Matter

Home-country registration protects you at home and nowhere else. Work out which countries you need:

• Where you sell. Each marketplace you enroll in usually needs a registration valid in that country or region.
• Where you manufacture. A defensive filing where your goods are made makes it much harder for a supplier or a squatter to register your name and block your own shipments. In first-to-file countries such as China, whoever registers first generally wins, whether or not they used the name.
• Where counterfeits show up. Coverage is what lets you act.

For several countries at once, WIPO's Madrid System (the Madrid Protocol) lets you file one international application and choose several member countries and regions. Whether that beats filing directly depends on how many countries and how many classes you need.

7. Get Your Specimens Right

This trips up more online sellers than anything else. A specimen has to show the trademark being used in commerce for the goods you claimed, in a way a customer would encounter.

For physical products, a photo of the product with the label or tag showing the trademark is the safest evidence. For online sales, a listing screenshot can work, but it has to show the trademark near the product, plus the price and a way to order. Mockups, invoices, business cards, and promotional graphics are usually refused.

Practical tip: take proper photos of the labeled product before the first shipment leaves. Reconstructing that evidence a year later is painful.

8. Enroll in the Brand Program on Every Platform You Sell On

This is the payoff. Once you have a registration, the platform tools open up.

• Amazon Brand Registry gives you control over your listings plus proactive protections and reporting tools. It has specific requirements about which registration and which countries count: see Amazon Brand Registry trademark requirements.
• TikTok Shop has its own IP protection portal for rights owners. What it removes and what happens to the seller is covered in TikTok Shop IP enforcement.
• Shopify handles IP complaints per store rather than as a marketplace program. See Shopify IP takedown enforcement.
• Etsy and eBay run IP reporting programs rather than brand registries. They let a rights owner report infringing listings, but they do not give you the listing-control features Amazon does. See Etsy IP reporting and takedowns and eBay marketplace IP takedown.
• Alibaba runs its own IP protection platform for the Alibaba and Taobao ecosystem: Alibaba counterfeit takedown guide.

Enrollment itself is free everywhere. The registration is the cost.

If you sell physical goods that get counterfeited at volume, also consider recording your trademark with customs. In the United States that is a Customs and Border Protection recordation; the United Kingdom and the European Union have equivalent applications for action. It lets border officers detain suspect shipments before they reach a warehouse.

9. Watch, Then Act

Registration is the tool. Monitoring is what makes you use it.

Watch for new applications for names close to yours on the registers you care about, for copycat listings on the platforms you sell on, for domain squatting, and for impersonation accounts on social media. You can do this manually, and plenty of small sellers do, but a watch service catches things earlier and across more registers than a person checking on a Sunday.

When you find something, have a settled response rather than an improvised one:

• Document it. Screenshots with dates and URLs, before the listing changes.
• Judge the severity. A small seller using a similar name in good faith is a different problem from an organized counterfeit operation.
• Use the platform first. A brand registry or IP report is faster and cheaper than a letter, and it works.
• Escalate where the platform route is not enough. A cease-and-desist letter from counsel resolves most of what is left.

Consistent enforcement also strengthens your rights. A trademark you never police gets weaker over time.

Keep It Alive

Registrations run on ten-year terms nearly everywhere, and the United States asks for a declaration of use between years five and six. In USPTO fees, that Section 8 declaration is $325 per class, and the combined Section 8 and Section 9 renewal at year ten is $650 per class. Put both in a calendar the day the certificate arrives.

Once a year, take an hour and check: does the registration still cover what you sell now, have new product lines appeared that need their own filing, are you paying to renew a trademark you dropped two years ago, and does your country coverage still match where the revenue is.

Someone copying your trademark? A cease-and-desist letter is often the fastest first step.

Sources

• USPTO: trademark basics
• USPTO: trademark fee information
• EUIPO: fees and payments
• UKIPO: trade mark forms and fees
• WIPO: the Madrid System