Implementing a Strong MAP Policy Against Sellers You Do Not Supply

A MAP notice works on a seller who buys from you, because the thing behind it is supply. Send the same notice to a seller who has no relationship with you and it is an email to a stranger. Nothing you can withhold reaches them.

Establishing which kind of seller you are looking at is the first thing to do with any violating listing, and it changes everything that follows.

Two kinds of violator

The authorised seller who breaches policy has something to lose. The sequence from notice to mailed letter to a stop on resupply works because each step costs them more than the last.

The unauthorised seller has none of that. They bought the part from one of your distributors, from one of that distributor’s customers, or from a business that closed and liquidated its stock. A letter is a suggestion. What ends it is finding the route the product travelled and closing it.

Finding the supply route is the actual job

A test purchase answers the question a notice cannot. Buy the part. Then read the return address, the packing slip, any distributor labelling on the box, and the serial number if the part carries one. Match that against your own shipment records and you have the distributor to have a conversation with.

That is the step that closes a leak. Without it you are notifying the same problem every quarter under a new storefront name.

A storefront name is not an identity

One operator commonly runs several storefronts, and treating each listing as a separate seller multiplies the work while hiding the pattern. The research is unglamorous. Business registration lookups, shared phone numbers and return addresses, site and contact footprints, and cross-referencing every storefront found in your programme against the others.

Five listings collapse into one company to write to, and that company usually turns out to be buying from one place.

The Do Not Sell list is the part that ends it

Identification is only worth something if it reaches your distributors in a form they can act on. That means a current list of entity names and storefronts, distributed to everyone who supplies your parts. With a process for adding to it, and for taking a resolved seller off.

A list that lives in your inbox does nothing. A list your distributors check before they ship is the tier that works.

Sometimes the cheaper answer is to authorise them

An unauthorised seller with real volume and a decent operation is a candidate for your dealer network. Bringing them inside the policy converts a problem you cannot reach into a seller you can. It also shows you where their stock comes from.

That is a commercial decision, and it goes wrong when it is made as a reward for misbehaving. Use the same criteria you would use for any new dealer.

What price tells you about where the part came from

A price far below what any authorised seller could buy at is a reason to ask where the unit came from. It may be diverted stock, it may be old stock from a closed account, and it may not be your part at all. Where a marketplace pools identical units from different sellers into one inventory, a counterfeit in that pool can be shipped against a legitimate listing. That question is worth answering properly.

A test purchase settles it. Guessing does not.

The identification work, the test purchases and the Do Not Sell list all sit in our MAP monitoring and enforcement service. They matter most against sellers you do not supply.