Enforcing Your MAP Policy: What Happens After the Notice Is Ignored

A MAP policy sets the lowest price a reseller may advertise. It says nothing about the price they may sell at, which is what keeps it separate from telling a reseller what to charge. Enforcement is the sequence that runs when a reseller advertises below the figure. What decides whether the sequence works is what you do after the second notice is ignored.

What a first notice should contain

Send it as a correction. A first violation is often a stale price in a promotion nobody rechecked.

• the product and the SKU
• the URL of the listing, and the time the price was captured
• the screenshot
• your MAP figure for that product
• the date the current policy was sent to them, and to whom
• a deadline and a named person to reply to

Nothing else. Threat language in a first notice gets forwarded to a lawyer, and then everything takes six weeks.

The four tiers

1. Notice. Email, from a template your counsel has approved, in the words of your own policy.
2. Repeat contact. Phone, then a letter by post. Some sellers answer paper and nothing else.
3. Supply. A Do Not Sell list your distributors can act on. This is the only tier that ends a habitual violator instead of moving it to another storefront.
4. Platform. Only where the listing genuinely infringes your intellectual property. A price below your policy is not infringement, and filing it as one works once and costs you standing with the platform afterwards.

The first month

Announce the policy to sellers before anything is monitored, in plain language, with the date it takes effect. Follow up a couple of weeks later with a short summary and the consequences. Start monitoring and measure the compliance rate before the first notice goes out. Without a starting number, every later claim about progress is an opinion.

Then run the cycle. Notice, recheck on your own schedule, follow up. Acknowledge the sellers who fix it, final notice to the ones who do not, supply action after that. Hold the schedule. Sellers work out the gaps in an inconsistent one faster than you would like.

Forms a violation takes

The number in the price field is not the whole story. Buy-one-get-one offers, and bundles carrying the discount. Coupon codes applied at checkout, and listings that hide the price until the product is in the cart. All four change what a shopper ends up seeing. Monitoring that reads the listed price alone reports those as compliant.

What software does, and where it stops

Software finds listings, watches them continuously and keeps reminders on schedule. That is real work and it does not scale by hand.

What it does not do is work out which company is behind a storefront called PowerDeals Direct. Or write to a distributor about a supply route. Or take the call when a dealer is angry. Those steps are what actually end violations, and they are people. A tool without somebody owning the half after detection buys you a well-organised record of the problem.

The legal posture

We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. Two points are worth putting to counsel before you enforce anything. A MAP policy is normally written as a policy you issue, not an agreement you sign with a reseller. And a manufacturer’s own decision about whom it keeps supplying has been treated differently from an agreement on price. That treatment dates from United States v. Colgate and Co., 250 U.S. 300 (1919). Resale price maintenance has been judged under the rule of reason since Leegin Creative Leather Products v. PSKS, 551 U.S. 877 (2007). Some states are stricter. The service runs against the policy your counsel writes.