MAP Policies and Margin: Where the Discount Goes Instead

A MAP policy protects the advertised price. It does not protect your margin. When the document names a figure and stops there, the listed number stays clean and the discount moves somewhere the policy never mentioned.

The four places it goes

Shipping. Free delivery on a heavy part is a real discount with a real cost. On a bumper or an exhaust it is a large one. The listed price is untouched.

Bundles. Your part plus a fitting kit at a total that prices your part under the floor. The arithmetic is visible to a shopper and invisible to a price check that reads one listing at a time.

Coupons. A code applied on the page, or a site-wide banner, or a clip-to-save box next to the price. The advertised figure is at policy until the shopper does nothing at all except click it.

The cart. Add to cart to see price is designed so the advertised price is never displayed. Whether your policy reaches a price in the cart is contested. The post on what counts as an advertised price covers it separately. The design itself tells you what it is for.

Write the policy against what the shopper sees

The fix is definitional, and it belongs to whoever drafts your policy. What the document has to settle:

• whether the figure means the price before or after site-applied discounts and codes
• how a bundle containing your part is valued against the floor
• whether shipping terms count toward the advertised price, and from what order value
• whether a price shown only after add to cart is in scope, and what you expect a seller to do instead

We are not your lawyers and none of this is legal advice. It is the list of gaps that come up once a policy meets a reseller who wants the sale.

What monitoring has to read

A check that reads the number in the price field will report a compliance rate that is too good. It has to read the figure a shopper ends up seeing, which means following the coupon, the bundle and the cart gate.

That is slower and it finds fewer clean pages, which is the point. A tidy compliance report usually means the checks are matching on the easy field.

The honest limit

Even a policy that covers all of it only governs advertising. What a reseller charges at the till is a different question, and it is one where US law draws a sharp line. The first starting point your counsel will know is United States v. Colgate and Co., 250 U.S. 300 (1919). It concerns a manufacturer’s own decision about whom to keep supplying. The second is Leegin Creative Leather Products v. PSKS, 551 U.S. 877 (2007), which put resale price maintenance under the rule of reason. Several states are stricter than federal law. Your counsel writes the policy and we enforce it as written.