Implementing a MAP Policy: What Order to Do It In

Write the policy. Send it to every seller you supply and keep a dated record of who got it. Take a reading of how many listings are already under price. Then send the first notice. A programme that opens at the notice step is arguing from a document the seller can say they never received. That argument ends the conversation before it starts.

First, decide what the policy covers

A minimum advertised price policy sets the lowest price at which a reseller may advertise your product. It says nothing about the price the reseller charges at checkout. That separation is why MAP is treated differently from resale price maintenance, and it has to be plain in the document itself.

We are not lawyers and none of this is legal advice. Two things are worth taking to counsel before anything is written. The first is that separation. The second is about supply. In the US, a manufacturer’s unilateral 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). Several states are stricter than federal law. Counsel writes the policy. Everything below is about running one.

Four things have to be named in the document or they get argued about later:

• which SKUs are on the list
• what counts as an advertisement, including marketplace ads, comparison feeds, email and social posts
• what happens after a violation, step by step
• who at your company a seller writes to when they disagree

Without a name, the reply goes to whoever sent the notice and stops there.

Then get it to every seller, and prove you did

Distribution is the step that quietly decides everything downstream. Send the policy to each seller by name, record the date, and keep the record where the person writing notices can find it. Make acknowledgement part of onboarding for new accounts. Reissue it whenever a figure changes, because a seller working from last year’s file is not being difficult.

Sellers you never speak to are the hard case. Where a dealer buys through a distributor, the policy still has to reach them. Send it to the distributor with an instruction to pass it down. Then ask for the list of who it went to.

Take a reading before you enforce

Run monitoring across the whole MAP list and record where prices actually sit before the first notice goes out. Without that starting number, every later claim about progress is an opinion. Record the listings that are at or above policy too. A count of violations found tells you how hard someone looked.

Read the figure the shopper ends up with, which is not always the number on the page. A stacked coupon and a bundle both move it. A price that appears only in the cart is there to keep the number off the page. Whether your policy reaches it depends on how the policy defines advertising. That is a reason to define it carefully.

Enforce in tiers, and only then

Email notice first, in language taken from your own policy, naming the listing, the price found and the time it was found. Phone and a letter in the post where email is ignored. Then the supply route, through a Do Not Sell list your distributors will act on. That is the tier that ends a repeat violator, and does not move it somewhere else.

What the sequence will not fix

Where a marketplace is selling as a first-party retailer it sets its own retail price, and there is nobody to send a notice to. That is a sourcing question wearing an enforcement costume. A seller outside your distribution network, buying from a liquidator or from overseas, may not be reachable at any tier either. Working out where the stock came from is the part that ends those.

How we run this end to end is on the MAP monitoring and enforcement page.