What is Minimum Advertised Price (MAP), and What Goes in a MAP Policy

Minimum advertised price is the lowest figure a reseller may advertise your product at. It says nothing about the price they may actually sell at. Every workable policy is built on that one distinction, and most of the arguments about MAP are really arguments about where advertising ends.

MAP, MSRP and the selling price

MSRP is a suggestion about what a product should retail for. It has no floor and no consequence attached to it.

MAP is a floor, and only on the advertised figure. A reseller can advertise at your number and sell for less. At the till, by negotiation, in a cart, or through a code a shopper has to go and find.

The selling price is whatever the shopper pays. That number is the reseller’s to set, and it is the part US law treats most carefully.

The legal posture, as plainly as we can put it

We are not lawyers and nothing here is legal advice. Your counsel drafts the policy. Three things are worth knowing before that conversation.

A MAP policy governs the advertised price, which is what keeps it distinct from resale price maintenance. A manufacturer’s own decision about whom it will keep 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 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.

Anyone who tells you MAP is simply legal, full stop, is skipping the part that matters.

What the document has to contain

The figure, per part number. Not a percentage off something, and not a rule somebody has to compute. A number a reseller can look up.

What counts as advertised. Marketplace listings, your own dealers’ sites, comparison engines, email, paid ads, print, in-store signage. Say whether a price behind an add-to-cart gate is in scope, and whether a coupon applied at checkout changes the advertised figure. The gaps in this section are where violations live.

Scope by channel. Some brands run one number online and a different treatment in physical retail. Whichever you choose, say it. Internet-only variants get written as IMAP, and the initials matter less than the sentence defining them.

How a reseller finds the current number. A policy nobody can look up is one people guess at. Give a location, a format, and a date the current version took effect.

Effective dates for changes. A price change with no notice period produces violations that are really administrative errors. Chasing those burns the goodwill you need for the real ones.

The consequence sequence. Written in order, applied the same way to a large account and a small one. Inconsistent enforcement is the argument every violator reaches for first.

Who it was sent to, and proof of it. A policy the reseller never received is the weakest thing you can bring to the argument.

What to leave out

A reporting channel for resellers to report each other sounds useful and produces a queue of complaints about competitors, most of them unusable as evidence. If you want it, treat it as a tip line and verify everything yourself.

Reward schemes for compliance run into the same problem. Compliance is the baseline you are asking for. Paying for it makes the floor negotiable.

After the document exists

Distribution, then measurement, then enforcement, in that order. Send the policy and record who received it. Measure the compliance rate across your whole catalogue before a single notice goes out. Then start at the top of your consequence sequence.

Run it the other way round and you get notices citing a policy the seller can say they never saw. And a compliance figure with nothing to compare it to. Our MAP monitoring service page covers what that looks like in practice.