MAP Policy 101: Understanding, Implementing, and Succeeding

MAP stands for minimum advertised price. It is the lowest price at which a product may be advertised, set by the brand and applied to everyone selling the product. It says nothing about the price the product is finally sold at. If you have one question about MAP, that is the answer to it.

Here is the rest of the first hour.

Who the policy binds

Whoever received it and keeps buying from you. In practice that means your authorised dealers, and through your distributors, the resellers buying from them.

A seller that has never received the policy and does not buy through your network is outside it. Reaching that seller is a supply question, not a policy question, and the answer runs through whoever is actually shipping them stock.

What counts as advertising

Whatever your policy says counts. The listed price on a product page is the obvious case.

A coupon applied in the basket. A bundle. A store wide percentage banner. A page that hides the price until checkout. The document has to decide each of those explicitly. Leaving them out is how a policy ends up technically unbroken while the advertised price has disappeared.

What enforcement consists of

Four steps, in order.

1. A notice to the seller, in the language of your own policy.
2. Repeat contact where the notice is ignored, including a mailed letter. Some sellers answer only paper.
3. A do not sell instruction to the distributor supplying the parts.
4. The platform’s own process, which applies to genuine intellectual property infringement and does not apply to a price.

The third step is the one that ends a habitual violator. The first two usually move it to a different storefront.

What a first notice should contain

The listing URL, the date and time it was captured, and a screenshot. The part number, the advertised price found, and the policy price it should have been. The relevant clause of your policy, quoted. A correction deadline with an actual date. And what happens after that date.

The capture matters more than it sounds. Sellers change the price after a notice and then deny it was ever there. With a timestamped screenshot that conversation ends in one reply.

What to measure

The compliance rate across every listing found, including the compliant ones, read once before the first notice goes out and then tracked.

A count of violations found measures how hard somebody looked for them. It tells you nothing about whether the policy is holding.

What a running programme looks like from the outside.