How to Enforce MAP Pricing

The Ins and Outs of Test Buying and Serial Number Tracking
How Unauthorized Sellers Beat Amazon Vendor Central at the Buy Box to Ruin Your E Commerce Brand Reputation
How to Spot Unauthorized Sellers with Multiple Accounts on the Same Listing

How to Remove MAP Violators and map violations

Wondering How to Enforce MAP Pricing on Amazon and your MAP Policy?

For the health of your brand, it’s essential that your products sell for a set amount - which is why map pricing enforcement. Once you have established a pricing policy in place, you need to enforce it. There are a few ways to help make sure Amazon sellers are selling your products for the right price.

Now that we all shop on Amazon, it’s important to know how a seller, and especially manufacturers can enforce the Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) on Amazon. By learning the best strategies, and using MAP enforcement software (like we provide), you’ll be better able to protect your products from being sold below your specified Amazon MAP pricing.

Enforcing Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) regulations on Amazon may seem like a daunting task, but it is possible for most brands. The price on the listing tool will not be the same as the item’s MSRP, but that price can also be adjusted to ensure your item doesn’t sell for less than it should.

What is MAP on Amazon?

Minimum advertising pricing (MAP) is the amount a seller must charge for the product or service if advertised on Amazon. For instance, if you buy sunglasses from an authorized seller named "Joe's Sunglasses" on Amazon, he must charge at least the minimum advertised price.

Furthermore, the Minimum advertised price (MAP) is the minimum price at which a brand demands an item may be advertised, whether it be in a hotel, or online shopping sites like eBay or Amazon. MAP pricing is used to create a uniform price standard across all sellers.

Tips For Enforcing Your MAP Pricing

If you’re a manufacturer or brand owner that sells products on Amazon, you will need to enforce MAP pricing on Amazon. So, we the team here at Brand Alignment have a few ways to ensure that your prices are as set forth by the MAP policies.

Here are a few quick tips:

Make sure that you have an Authorized Reseller Agreement with your authorized network with a MAP pricing policy.
Use our services to monitoring products and sellers on Amazon to see who is obeying MAP pricing and who isn't.
Being Cease & Desist enforcement services for unauthorized sellers violating MAP and begin contacting your authorized network who is violating MAP.

Wait, there's more for us to tell you about MAP enforcement and MAP policies.

#1 Use Product Serialization

Many product serial numbers are pre-molded into the products and can easily be seen in a high-resolution photograph. This helps the brand determine which distributor a seller purchases products from. By creating a Do Not Sell list, a brand can instruct their distributors which wholesalers and retailers to avoid selling product to in order to reduce the amount of inventory available on Amazon that is breaking MAP.

#2 Send a Cease & Desist Letter

With a Cease & Desist letter, you can officially inform someone to stop doing something that is causing you harm and threatening your business. These letters are effective because they're not just sent to the violator - they're sent to the violator's CEO or COO and the HR department of the company he/she works for. That gives them a much bigger impact than standard communication.

#3 You May Want To Offer A Product Warranty

This is an important detail to work out prior to agreements with retail partners. The warranty will be void in instances of fraud or if the product was not originally purchased from you or an authorized distributor of yours. It should also specify that it does not cover defects caused by a third party.

#4 Locate Key Distribution & Retail Buyers to Track

Many companies may not have clear contracts with their distributors or retailers in place. It is important to review your current relationships and have a written negotiated / fair trade pricing policy in effect. If you do not have a MAP policy, it may be time for you to draft one.

Why is MAP Pricing Difficult To Manage on Amazon and Other Platforms?

Before you learn how to compete with MAP on Amazon... not only to beat MAP on Amazon, but to also be able to execute a winning MAP strategy on the world's largest e-commerce platform... we need to first understand why MAP is such a crazy battlefield.

MAP pricing is a problem on Amazon because pricing is automated and your competitors are constantly changing their prices in order to compete for the Buy Box. The biggest prize on Amazon is the Buy Box and it goes to the sellers with the lowest price on a listing. This leaves a massive conflict of interest when it comes to MAP pricing.

Determining MAP pricing is one of the trickiest aspects of selling on Amazon. Manufacturers have a number of policies that can subject your account to a penalty or even suspension if you don’t follow them. These policies can be confusing, especially when it comes to combined products that contain the same product in different packages that have different prices, and brand-specific product lines.

Distribution on Amazon

If you're considering selling on Amazon, it's important to understand the product distribution process. Here's how it works: First, companies decide what products they want in their catalog. They then work with manufacturers to produce these items and ship them to one of the dozens of Amazon fulfilment centers. The warehouses are called "fulfillment centers" because they fulfill customer orders that come through. These fulfillment centers have millions of different types of items on the shelves and each one is stocked according to the needs of Amazon customers in that region.

Making Sure Your MAP Enforcement Sticks!

Bottom line, if you are tired of a persistent struggle to get your pricing policy enforced on Amazon and take back control of diminishing sales, there is a proven solution that will help you achieve success when it comes to managing your brand on Amazon.

At Brand Alignment, we can help you and your business's MAP policy and MAP pricing.

While some sellers choose to leave the brand enforcement of MAP policy to Amazon, you still have the choice. Ongoing MAP policy guidelines have numerous advantages, including a way to keep more profit at the end of the month, and better control over your product listing prices. There are additional tactics we employ to maintain high MAP compliance rates on Amazon.

Don't Have the Time to Do It Yourself?

Let us Take Care of Your Monitoring & Enforcement

The first step in removing unauthorized sellers is spotting them on your listings and that is exactly what the Brand Alignment Monitoring Dashboard will do for you. With price updates every 3 hours and inventory totals for every seller on every listing, you will get the most complete picture possible of your brand on every major online marketplace.

Of course, the most important step in removing unauthorized sellers is prevention and enforcement. This is where Brand Alignment is leagues above the competition when it comes to the best Amazon map enforcement software.

1
Clear over 80% of unauthorized sellers: Brand Alignment will make a custom strategy for your brand reputation to ensure the highest rates of removal
2
Control Your Authorized Channels: Daily emails informing you of authorized channel violations and price cascading events
3
Risk-Free Guarantee: Brand Alignment is so confident in their removal rates, that we will create a custom guarantee for every brand. We will remove x% of sellers or you have the option to terminate the contract early

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Will Enforcement Solutions Work for My Brand?

In short, the answer is Yes.

We have had our 80%-90%+ enforcement rates in every single industry we have worked in. That includes the following:

Consumer Electronics
Apparel and Shoes
Pharmaceuticals
Health & Beauty
Sports & Outdoors
Mobile Phone Accessories
And More

As you are already aware, each industry has their own bells and whistles. Please contact us if you have any specific questions about enforcement in your industry.

Are There Any Risks Involved With Enforcement?

Brand Alignment gives the brand the option of using their own personal cease & desist letters or the option to customize Brand Alignment's proven high performance Cease & Desist letters. These letters were crafted by Intellectual Property lawyers with a full focus on minimizing liability.

Any infringement complaints filed by Brand Alignment are done with the utmost care and transparency. We do not file counterfeit complaints without test buys and approval from the brand. Our trademark complaints are done with caution and all bases covered.

Finally, in this world, anybody can sue anybody for anything. But it does not mean it will stand up in court. There is nothing we can do to prevent frivolous lawsuits from disgruntled sellers. However, we do everything we can to prepare you to have any case against you quickly dismissed. After two years in business, we are proud to say that neither us or any of our brands have had any legal issues of any kind related to our service.

Brand Alignment vs The Competition

If you are new to shopping for a brand protection provider, it might be confusing to tell the difference between companies. It might sound like everybody offers the same type of monitoring and enforcement. This could not be further from the truth.

Brand Alignment

Crawls marketplaces for dynamic pricing changes every 3 hours or 8x a day
Markets monitored for price cascading are crawled every hour or 24x a day
Sends a Cease & Desist letter to every unauthorized seller on Amazon
Since 100% of all unauthorized sellers are contacted, Brand Alignment averages an 80%-90%+ Removal Rate
Uses hundreds of proprietary investigative techniques to identify personal information of sellers and supply chain sources

The Competition

Crawls marketplaces for pricing only 1x-4x a day
Markets monitored for price cascading are crawled every 3 hours or 8x a day
Requires YOU to send a Cease & Desist letter only if YOU have the email of the unauthorized seller
Since only a small percentage of unauthorized sellers are contacted, the competition averages a 10%-30% removal rate
Uses basic investigative techniques like Google searches or buying low quality lists in hopes of finding emails to send letters

How Much Money Are You Losing By NOT Switching to Brand Alignment?

What is your current Buy Box Loss percentage? How much unsold inventory do you or your authorized channels have due to Buy Box loss?
How much are you charged by Vendors for chargebacks related to price matching MAP violators?
What effect do unauthorized sellers have on your Brand Integrity when they violate MAP policy or sell refurbished, returned, or used items as New?

Are you dealing with unhappy authorized channels who have difficulty obtaining the Buy Box? Are you being turned down by potential authorized channels for not having better control of your MAP policy?
Did you know that data shows that less sales are made from 3rd party sellers having the Buy Box than from Amazon having the Buy Box?
What are your storage and warehousing costs from unsold inventory due to unauthorized sellers?

How Much Money In Sales Are You Losing Each Year Due to a Lack of Quality Brand Protection?

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100% Satisfaction Guarantee

You are fully protected by our "Brand Alignment Enforcement Guarantee". If we don't reach the custom benchmarks that we agree upon during negotiation, we will give you the option to terminate the contract and you will not be charged any further.

Emmanuel Frost