MAP Compliance: A Retailer's Handbook

A MAP policy sets the lowest price you may advertise a product at. It does not set the price you may sell it at. That difference is the first line to find in whatever policy you were handed, because it decides how much room you have left to compete.

This is written for the retailer side of the table, working inside a policy somebody else wrote.

Advertised price, sale price, MSRP

MSRP is a suggestion and carries no consequence. MAP is a floor on what you may publish. The price a customer finally pays is a third thing, and a policy that tried to fix it would be a different instrument in law.

In the United States that line has mattered since United States v. Colgate and Co., 250 U.S. 300 (1919). That case treated a manufacturer’s unilateral choice about whom it keeps supplying differently from an agreement on price. Resale price maintenance itself 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. We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. Your counsel reads your policy.

What counts as the advertised price

The listed number is only the start of it. The policy text decides which of these count, so read the definition before you build a promotion on top of it.

• a site-wide coupon code that shows on the listing page
• a strikethrough price printed beside yours
• a bundle where the whole discount lands on the covered part
• free shipping or store credit, where the policy values them as money off
• the price shown in the cart before checkout

How careful retailers breach anyway

Almost none of this is defiance. It is plumbing.

A blanket instruction to take ten percent off comes back as ten percent of cost, because the feed applied it to the wrong column. A marketplace enrols your listings in its own promotion and the discount is applied without you touching anything. A repricer chases a competitor below the floor overnight. A coupon aggregator publishes a code you retired months ago. Your distributor’s price file disagrees with the manufacturer’s, and you have been pricing off the wrong file since the last update.

That last one is worth a standing habit. Take MAP figures from the brand that publishes them, and not from a distributor sheet that may be a version behind.

The first hour after a notice

Fix the price, then argue. Evidence is captured with a URL and a timestamp. The listing either was below policy or was not. The argument runs better once the number is back up.

Then ask three things:

• which listing and which channel
• what time the capture was taken
• what the current MAP file says, so you can check your own feed against it

If the cause was a feed, say which feed and when it refreshes. A brand chasing a habitual violator is looking for exactly that answer to stop chasing you.

What the brand can actually do

The realistic end of an escalation is supply. Co-op advertising money can be withdrawn, an authorised listing can be removed, and a distributor can be told to stop shipping you the part. A platform complaint dressed up as an intellectual property claim is a different matter, and price alone is not infringement.

Being on a brand’s compliant list is a commercial asset. It is who gets the co-op budget and the referrals, which is worth more than a weekend of undercutting. If you want to see the same programme from the brand’s side, that is what we run.