What a MAP policy protects, and what it does not

A MAP policy protects one number, the price your product is advertised at. That number is what comparison pages, marketplace listings and your own dealers read when they decide what to charge. It is not the price your customer finally pays, and a policy sold internally as protection for anything wider will disappoint whoever signed it off.

One correction first, because it turns up in most explanations of MAP. A MAP policy is normally issued by the manufacturer on its own, not negotiated as a contract clause with each reseller. That difference is deliberate and it is a legal one, which we went through in MAP policies and the law.

How an advertised price falls

The mechanism is worth watching because it is mechanical. One reseller advertises under the floor. Comparison engines and marketplace listings surface the lowest advertised figure, so that number is now the first one a shopper sees. Your other dealers see it too. A dealer who matches it stops covering the costs that made them worth having. A dealer who does not match it explains the difference to every customer arriving with the lower price on a phone screen.

Once the advertised price has settled at the lower number it does not come back on its own. Nobody wants to be the first to move up. That is what the policy is holding shut. The cost of leaving it open shows up in the dealers who stop stocking you, long after it shows up in margin.

What it does not protect

The transaction price. A reseller can advertise at your floor and sell under it in a phone call or an emailed quote. That is the design, and it is what keeps a MAP policy distinct from an agreement about selling prices.

A marketplace selling as the retailer of record. It sets its own retail price on stock it owns. There is no seller to notify, and the route that stock took is the question worth asking instead.

Sellers outside your network. A notice to a storefront that never bought from you has nowhere to land. What ends that one is working out which distributor supplied them and closing it.

Demand. If the product is not selling, holding the advertised price up will not fix that. Enforcing harder reads to your dealers as pressure applied in the wrong direction.

What to measure

The compliance rate across every listing found, starting from a number you recorded before you enforced anything. Then the sellers you could identify against the ones you could not, because an unidentified seller is what a supply leak hides behind.