Merch Informer Trademark Protection Now Live On Etsy

Since Merch Informer launched the trademark protection plugin in September of 2018, it has saved tens of thousands of rejections on Merch by Amazon from our users.

The fact of the matter is that there are LOTS of trademarks out there, many of them frivolous and they all pose a risk to your account. Going through the USPTO website is a pain, time consuming, and all around just not a fun time. You may end up using a word or phrase that is trademarked and you had NO idea. Well, the trademark extension put an end to that.

Over the last few months we have started to get more and more requests for the trademark protection plugin to check listings for Etsy.

Today, we launched just that feature!

If you are not selling on Etsy yet, I highly recommend reading through this post which will show you how you can re-purpose your SAME Merch designs onto clothing and sell to a completely new audience.

If you ARE selling on Etsy, read on to see how this works.

The Merch Informer Trademark Protection is free for all Merch Informer customers.

Merch Informer Trademark Protection on Etsy

The first thing you need to do is make sure you have the trademark extension installed.

You can get it here: Trademark Extension

Once you have the plugin installed, click on it in your Chrome menu which will open up a new window for you to log in!

Now that you are logged in, you are ready to use the trademark protection on your Etsy listings.

Here is how it works.

Checking Trademarks on Etsy Clothing

The trademark protection plugin is designed to check for 025 trademarks which is the clothing category. This means it should only be used if you are selling any type of clothing on Etsy. This will not currently work on mugs or any other goods.

So now that you have it installed, go to create a new listing. This will show up on old live listings, as well as when you are creating a new listing.

From your listings tab, go ahead and either click on an old product, or create a new product.

For this example, I will show you how it works with an older listing.

Once you click on the name of the listing, you will see all the spots where you can fill out your listing details (which for this shirt are already filled out).

In the bottom right hand corner, you will now see the new MI TM Check.

Once you click on that, the magic happens. It will go through your entire Etsy listing, word by word, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence and pull out anything that may have a trademark in clothing.

To show you how this works, I will enter in the word “Nike” into my title which is CLEARLY trademarked!

As you can see, it pulled back the trademarks for this listing and highlights them in red.

If you want to see a more detailed description of the trademarks with links to the USPTO, simply click on the red “Found X TMs” next to the MI TM Check button.

Notice that each of the trademarks has a serial number. This is a clickable link which will bring you over to the USPTO website so you can make sure that nothing in your listing is infringing before you put it live.

…and just like that, no more annoying trademark take downs for trademarks that you did NOT KNOW even existed!

Wrapping It Up

If you already have the trademark protection plugin installed, you will want to update it and it will ask you to accept the new permissions.

We hope that this new version of the extension should save you countless hours of frustration and many more by letting you bypass the USPTO website completely!

To your success!

Merch Informer Team