- The Ins and Outs of Test Buying and Serial Number Tracking
- How Unauthorized Sellers Beat Amazon Vendor Central at the Buy Box to Ruin Your E Commerce Brand Reputation
- How to Spot Unauthorized Sellers with Multiple Accounts on the Same Listing
Wondering How to Enforce MAP Pricing on Amazon and your MAP Policy?
For the health of your brand, it’s essential that your products sell for a set amount—which is why enforce MAP pricing is crucial. Once you have established a pricing policy in place, you need to enforce it. There are a few ways to help ensure Amazon sellers are selling your products for the right price.Now that we all shop on Amazon, it’s important to know how a seller, and especially manufacturers can enforce the Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) on Amazon. By learning the best strategies, and using MAP enforcement software (like we provide), you’ll be better able to protect your products from being sold below your specified Amazon MAP pricing.
Enforcing Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) regulations on Amazon may seem like a daunting task, but it is possible for most brands. The price on the listing tool will not be the same as the item’s MSRP, but that price can also be adjusted to ensure your item doesn’t sell for less than it should.
What is MAP on Amazon?
Minimum advertising pricing (MAP) is the amount a seller must charge for the product or service if advertised on Amazon. For instance, if you buy sunglasses from an authorized seller named “Joe’s Sunglasses” on Amazon, he must charge at least the minimum advertised price.
Furthermore, the Minimum advertised price (MAP) is the minimum price at which a brand demands an item may be advertised, whether it be in a hotel, or online shopping sites like eBay or Amazon. MAP pricing is used to create a uniform price standard across all sellers.
Tips for a successful strategy to enforce MAP pricing
If you’re a manufacturer or brand owner that sells products on Amazon, you will need to enforce MAP pricing on Amazon. So, we the team here at Brand Alignment have a few ways to ensure that your prices are as set forth by the MAP policies.
Here are a few quick tips:
- Make sure that you have an Authorized Reseller Agreement with your authorized network with a MAP pricing policy.
- Use our services to monitoring products and sellers on Amazon to see who is obeying MAP pricing and who isn’t.
- Being Cease & Desist enforcement services for unauthorized sellers violating MAP and begin contacting your authorized network who is violating MAP.
Wait, there’s more for us to tell you about MAP enforcement and MAP policies.
#1
Use Product Serialization
#2
Send a Cease & Desist Letter
With a Cease & Desist letter, you can officially inform someone to stop doing something that is causing you harm and threatening your business. These letters are effective because they’re not just sent to the violator – they’re sent to the violator’s CEO or COO and the HR department of the company he/she works for. That gives them a much bigger impact than standard communication.
#3
You May Want To Offer A Product Warranty
This is an important detail to work out prior to agreements with retail partners. The warranty will be void in instances of fraud or if the product was not originally purchased from you or an authorized distributor of yours. It should also specify that it does not cover defects caused by a third party.
#4
Locate Key Distribution & Retail Buyers to Track
Many companies may not have clear contracts with their distributors or retailers in place. It is important to review your current relationships and have a written negotiated / fair trade pricing policy in effect. If you do not have a MAP policy, it may be time for you to draft one.
Why is MAP Pricing Difficult To Manage on Amazon and Other Platforms?
Before you learn how to compete with MAP on Amazon… not only to beat MAP on Amazon, but to also be able to execute a winning MAP strategy on the world’s largest e-commerce platform… we need to first understand why MAP is such a crazy battlefield.
MAP pricing is a problem on Amazon because pricing is automated and your competitors are constantly changing their prices in order to compete for the Buy Box. The biggest prize on Amazon is the Buy Box and it goes to the sellers with the lowest price on a listing. This leaves a massive conflict of interest when it comes to MAP pricing.
How to enforce MAP pricing and determining MAP pricing is one of the trickiest aspects of selling on Amazon. Manufacturers have a number of policies that can subject your account to a penalty or even suspension if you don’t follow them. That’s why it’s crucial to enforce MAP pricing effectively. These policies can be confusing, especially when it comes to combined products that contain the same item in different packages with different prices, and brand-specific product lines. By implementing a strong strategy to enforce MAP pricing, you can avoid potential penalties and ensure consistent pricing across all your listings.
Distribution on Amazon
What products they want in their catalog. They then work with manufacturers to produce these items and ship them to one of the dozens of Amazon fulfillment centers. The warehouses are called “fulfillment centers” because they fulfill customer orders that come through. These fulfillment centers have millions of different types of items on the shelves, each one stocked according to the needs of Amazon customers in that region. By ensuring you enforce MAP pricing, you can maintain consistent pricing across platforms and protect your brand’s value throughout this distribution process.
Making Sure Your MAP Enforcement Sticks!
Bottom line, if you are tired of a persistent struggle to enforce MAP pricing on Amazon and want to take back control of diminishing sales, there is a proven solution that will help you achieve success in managing your brand on Amazon.
At Brand Alignment, we can help you and your business’s MAP policy and MAP pricing.
While some sellers choose to leave the brand enforcement of MAP policy to Amazon, you still have the choice. Ongoing MAP policy guidelines have numerous advantages, including a way to keep more profit at the end of the month, and better control over your product listing prices. There are additional tactics we employ to maintain high MAP compliance rates on Amazon.
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Thank you for reading our post, “How to Enforce MAP Pricing.” We hope you found it helpful.
Let us help you Enforce MAP Pricing effectively!
In an increasingly competitive marketplace, enforcing MAP pricing is essential for safeguarding your brand’s integrity. By implementing robust pricing enforcement strategies, you can prevent unauthorized discounts, maintain consistent pricing, and protect your brand’s reputation. Let us guide you in establishing the best practices to enforce MAP pricing, ensuring that your brand not only survives but thrives in the digital landscape.
Clear over 80% of unauthorized sellers: Brand Alignment will make a custom strategy for your brand to ensure the highest rates of removal.
Control Your Authorized Channels: Daily emails informing you of authorized channel violations and price cascading events.
Risk-Free Guarantee: Brand Alignment is so confident in their removal rates, that we will create a custom guarantee for every brand. We will remove x% of sellers or you have the option to terminate the contract early.
Brand Alignment vs The Competition
If you are new to shopping for an Amazon brand protection agency provider, it might be confusing to tell the difference between companies. It might sound like everybody offers the same type of monitoring and enforcement. This could not be further from the truth.
- Crawls marketplaces for pricing changes every 3 hours or 8x a day
- Markets monitored for price cascading are crawled every hour or 24x a day
- Sends a Cease & Desist letter to every unauthorized seller on Amazon
- Since 100% of all unauthorized sellers are contacted, Brand Alignment averages an 80%-90%+ Removal Rate
- Uses hundreds of proprietary investigative techniques to identify personal information of sellers and supply chain sources
The Competition
- Crawls marketplaces for pricing only 1x-4x a day
- Markets monitored for price cascading are crawled every 3 hours or 8x a day
- Requires YOU to send a Cease & Desist letter only if YOU have the email of the unauthorized seller
- Since only a small percentage of unauthorized sellers are contacted, the competition averages a 10%-30% removal rate
- Uses basic investigative techniques like Google searches or buying low quality lists in hopes of finding emails to send letters
Enforce MAP Pricing to Safeguard Your Brand
Ensuring MAP compliance is essential for protecting your brand’s value and pricing strategy. Our MAP enforcement services actively safeguard your listings across major platforms, working to prevent unauthorized price drops and keeping your brand consistent and respected. With a proactive approach, we help you reinforce MAP policies effectively, so your brand remains strong in the marketplace.
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