What a MAP Policy Does for a Brand, and Where It Stops

A MAP policy gives you two things. A written advertised floor that your resellers have received, and a consequence you have said in advance you will apply. Everything a policy is credited with beyond that depends on whether you can find the violation and reach the seller behind it.

What it does

It takes the advertised number out of the competition. When every listing shows one figure, a dealer competes on fitment advice, stock, delivery and returns. Those are things a good dealer can win on and a drop-shipper cannot.

It gives your dealers a reason to stock depth. A dealer holding inventory is exposed to anybody willing to advertise under them without holding any. A floor that is enforced is the argument for carrying the line at all.

It makes product performance readable. When prices sit at the same level across the channel, a part that sells tells you something about the part. When they do not, you are reading a discount pattern.

It gives your distributors something to act on. They get a Do Not Sell list backed by a written policy the seller was given. That is the application of stated terms.

Where it stops

A seller you cannot identify. A storefront name is not an identity. Where registration lookups, contact footprints and cross-referencing do not produce a company, there is nobody to write to.

A marketplace selling first-party. When the platform bought the stock, it sets its own retail price. That is a question about who supplied it and at what cost, and it gets answered in your distribution.

Stock you never sold into. Grey supply, liquidation lots and cross-border arbitrage. Nothing you do with your own distributors touches those, unless you can trace the route.

Counterfeits. A fake part is an intellectual property problem with its own route through the platforms. Price is the symptom.

What it costs to run

A policy is cheap to write and expensive to enforce, and the expensive part is where programmes fail. Detection is the easy half. After a violation is seen, somebody has to work out who the storefront belongs to. Then send a notice in the language of the policy, and chase the ones that ignore it. Then get a name to the distributor who can cut supply.

If nobody owns that sequence, the policy becomes a document that exists. Resellers work out quickly which brands enforce and which ones publish.

Outside the United States

Do not reuse the US document. The EU and the UK treat restrictions on resale pricing more strictly, and the analysis of advertised-price restrictions there is different from the US position. This is a question for local counsel before anything goes out to a reseller in those markets.

We are not lawyers and nothing here is legal advice. Your counsel will recognise the US starting points. They are United States v. Colgate and Co., 250 U.S. 300 (1919) and Leegin Creative Leather Products v. PSKS, 551 U.S. 877 (2007). Several states are stricter than federal law.

The one thing to get right first

Distribution and proof of receipt. A policy the seller never received is the weakest thing you can bring to an argument. It is the first thing a reseller who wants to keep discounting will raise.

Write it, send it, record who got it and when, then measure the compliance rate before the first notice goes out. Our MAP monitoring service page covers the rest of that sequence.