Avoiding The Map Trap: 5 Mistakes To Avoid When Creating Your Minimum Advertised Price Policy

July 3, 2024, 5:25 am

Every brand selling into the Amazon marketplace should consider a comprehensive MAP enforcement policy to protect their reputations and bottom lines. I want to share insights into some of the common questions I get about MAP pricing and important tips to help you protect your brand on Amazon. Let me add a caveat to this conservative approach that we typically take: A company that desires to do so can include a MAP policy in an agreement with a retailer, but there are some risks.

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According to Pamela Springer, CEO of ORIS Intelligence, a company which helps manufacturers preserve pricing integrity, simply monitoring the major online retail sites and marketplaces is not sufficient to protect your company's Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) policy. Map violations hurt your brand by destabilizing your regular price, eating into your retailers' margins (and your own), and making it more difficult for customers to identify legitimate sellers. If sellers don't believe you'll act on your policy, the MAP violations are going to keep piling up. Products that are advertised and sold at lower rates than stated in a brands' MAP policy agreement, create brand deterioration which diminishes value and is harmful for every business along the supply chain. Keeping authorized distributors happy. This means market behavior including price changes becomes visible, making it easier for brands to use the data to negotiate future agreements and maximize sales. If brick-and-mortar retailers lose the incentive to provide the level of service manufacturers require for their products, the market will likely skew toward the largest manufacturers making the lowest cost alternatives. Your Guide to Brand Management. The store or business name of the seller you are reporting. A retailer can offer a cheaper price in store or once a product is added to an online shopping cart, as long as the advertised price isn't below the agreed MAP level. For example, if Gucci bags were regularly sold at 50% off by third-party sellers, it will eventually lose its status as a luxury brand. A successful MAP pricing policy protection program includes the following actions: If your distribution base is spread widely, no matter how solid it is, tracking all the retailers and enforcing your MAP policy will become overwhelming. The end goal of all your brand protection plans should be enforcement. I sell directly to Amazon.

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After the initial warning, keep an observing eye on the violating resellers. Odds are, this environment has you thinking about pricing a lot. As a brand selling on Amazon Marketplace, enforcing a MAP pricing policy is vital. Yet, an effective MAP policy only fulfills its purpose when you have a monitoring and enforcement strategy for MAP pricing. Authorized sellers certainly have the most to gain by complying with a MAP policy. They aren't actively trying to prevent resellers from considerably reducing their prices either. Enforce minimum advertised price policy violation rule. Remind resellers that they must respect MAP or they will be banned as a seller for all products. Most brands will not stop selling on the platform because of Amazon breaking MAP.

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You should not do this without an antitrust attorney. Specifically, companies should begin by focusing their enforcement efforts on the most serious (i. e. highest volume) unauthorized sellers. MAP violations need to be tracked at a large scale, given the sheer amount of online platforms where potential non-compliance can occur. Many of the rules you used when creating general pricing strategies will apply here. Amazon can help you protect your brand and its intellectual property once Amazon's brand registry team is always aware of it. How likely are your retailers to follow the policy? Enforce minimum advertised price policy violation in florida. Minimum Advertised Pricing Policy is legal in the United States under antitrust statutes, as it only links to "advertised" pricing, It and does not notify a seller how much they can sell it for in their store, which makes this practice legal, and acts as a means of insurance and security towards the manufacturers. We'd love to give you immediate access to our Commerce Execution Suite, but first we need some information. No, Amazon is not particularly concerned about upholding your MAP prices.

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When there are multiple resellers on a single product listing, Amazon chooses which seller is granted the Buy Box based on a variety of factors, and the lowest price is one of the most important ones. Since some MAP violations only occur when an item is in cart, you'll want a tool that checks those prices as well. In any event, you will need an antitrust attorney to help you through this, so the best I can do here for you to is to help you spot the issues so you can understand if you are moving in the right direction. Cutting off access to your products is the main enforcement action you can take against sellers who violate MAP pricing on Amazon. Simply put, being too heavy-handed might give sellers the impression that you're blowing smoke in an effort to appear big and bad. Ensure you remain up to date with your sellers, their identity, and the channels to which they are supplying your products, as most MAP violation problems begin with a leaky supply chain. This is a problem that can lead to a myriad of unfortunate consequences, like lost revenue and a negative impact on your brand image. Prevent underpricing. We have found this strategy to be very effective in removing unwanted resellers. 3 Ways to Identify Minimum Advertised Price Violations. One of our distributors is violating MAP on Amazon. For example, a company might suspend a non-compliant distributor for 60 days for a second violation and then six months or a year for the next one. If instead you engage in extensive back-and-forth communications with a noncompliant retailer, a court may see those communications as an agreement. Protecting your brand value on Amazon is no easy task, but it is doable with the right strategy and tools. Finally, as you think about your MAP policy, consider that at best it will be subject to the antitrust rule of reason, so if the anticompetitive aspects of the agreement exceed the procompetitive benefits, you may still have a problem.

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Brand Protection Definition. This is especially pronounced on a marketplace like Amazon, where price is incredibly important to shoppers. It is not enough to establish a policy and then work to prevail against any retailers that file antitrust suits against you. In other words, you would have an antitrust problem no matter what the restraint—MAP or something else. You will not find your ideal MAP policy online. Enforce minimum advertised price policy violation adsense. Don't let resellers' low prices affect your price perception and eat away at your profits. Top offenders should always be at the top of the list so that your biggest problems can be addressed and dealt with ASAP. And, if other retailers discover that your position is flexible, they will either want to negotiate themselves, or they might simply choose to ignore the MAP and force you to go to court to resolve the matter. Firstly, brands tend to inform those who respect the MAP pricing policy of new products before anyone else in good faith. Thin the herd: Building your business with trusted sellers is the only smart way to go. For brands, manufacturers, and wholesalers, MAP monitoring and enforcement is the process of managing all the communication with retailers and dealing with policy violators when they happen.

Setting wholesale prices that don't leave enough margin to undercut your MAP pricing on Amazon. Do MAP Policies Violate the Antitrust Laws? Two strategies that can be effective are: - Controlling the number of resellers.