How to Deal With MAP Violators And Map Violations - Tips & Tricks

Online Brand Protection, minimum advertised price map and map enforcing on Amazon, Walmart, or many of the other major marketplaces can be both a complex and simple process. On one hand, there are multitudes of details that are important to know to get a strong grasp on your marketplace and map violations. But then again, the philosophies behind brand protection can be whittled down to just a few key concepts. Let's keep a competitive price for your brand and make sure your sellers are adhering to map compliance.

What do you do when your electronic Cease & Desist letters didn’t work? You need to find out who this unauthorized seller is, since it’s unlikely they use their full name or actual business name (although some do). The most obvious next step is a test buy.

There are two ways to do this. If your brand’s product has serial numbering on each package or unit, you are in great shape. Buy the product from each unauthorized seller and track the serial number. Now you have a starting point for your investigation.

Either a distributor has a leak in the supply chain, a retailer had to get rid of excess inventory, or a guy uses a retail store, kiosk, or expo booth as a front to sell the product online where it is far more profitable (or else there is a shadow hierarchy which we describe in another article).

But it’s not enough to have serial numbering. If you have your serial number printed on a box in ink, it can easily be removed with nail polish remover and a Q-tip. We recommend having your serial numbers etched on to the product itself, if possible. This is much more difficult to scratch off. Now, if they decide to remove the inked serial number, but can’t remove the etched serial number, you have product tampering which can be a misdemeanor and no longer a civil breach of contract case. Very easy to scare the unauthorized seller off now, or go all in by using a legal team to stop the person or company violating your MAP.

Many brands think they hit the home run by being accepted to the Amazon Vendor Central program. They think they are home safe and that Amazon will take care of their listings from here on out. But if their brand is not brand gated, nothing has changed for them regarding unauthorized sellers.

But that doesn’t mean you are in the clear from unauthorised reselling. If you have come to a MAP pricing agreement with Amazon, nothing stops other resellers from violating MAP price on most listings and winning the buy box. Which is why you need map pricing enforcement. We have seen so many listings where Amazon has the product listed at something like $129.95 while the buy box price is $49.95 by an FBA seller, especially in beauty categories or kiosk products that have large wholesale to MSRP margins where brand reputation and image is paramount. Amazon also knows how many items the FBA seller has in stock so they may allow the FBA seller to sell out their inventory at a lower price instead of competing and taking a loss if that’s what their algorithm chooses.

First, you need to think like an unauthorized seller. If you don’t have any ethics, why would you share 50% of the Buy Box when you can get 90%? Well, that’s what many unauthorized sellers do. Amazon has a very, very strict rule: the same seller cannot sell the same listing under multiple Amazon accounts. If you violate that rule, you’re done. All of your violating accounts are suspended. But that doesn’t stop some of these sellers.

They open dozens of Amazon accounts, using dozens of business checking accounts under a multitude of LLC names, which in some states you can get online for $50 in less than an hour. They then begin the process of category ungating, sometimes using forged invoices (easily done with Photoshop or even MS Paint).

There are a couple ways to identify them. The quickest way is to click on their profile and look at their other listings. Amazon automatically sorts their other products by top-selling, so these sellers will often sell the same top products on multiple accounts; they are too lazy to mix up the accounts with different products or else have way too many products to organize this. So when you see 8 accounts sharing the Buy Box on a certain brand of lipstick, and also sharing a Buy Box on a bundle of batteries (a totally different brand or category), chances are you just spotted one person or distributor with multiple accounts.

Your best weapon is the amount of work they have to do to hide themselves. If you have 10,000 products on 3 different Amazon accounts, it’s difficult to track them unless you have many employees doing the grunt work. Let’s consider a hair dryer with 40 sellers with a Buy Box price of $29.95. On the 2nd page of sellers we might find 3 different FBA sellers with a price of $42.37. What are the odds that 3 different sellers have the same awkward price that has no chance of getting a sale? What you are seeing is one person or distributor who set the same minimum price on his automatic price matching on all 3 accounts, and due to the sheer number of products he has for sale, forgot about or never noticed that he no longer has the Buy Box on this item. Check the other products on these accounts and you’ll find that they share hundreds of the same listings and brands.

Once you’ve identified these sellers, contact Seller Performance on Amazon and let them know. They might not do anything for a while, but you might be surprised months later when all the accounts suddenly have no products for sale - protecting your brand identity! 😉 If these are unauthorized sellers or MAP violators, you have just dealt a death blow to their business for a long time.

The first step in removing unauthorized sellers is spotting them on your listings and that is exactly what the Brand Alignment Monitoring Dashboard will do for you. With price updates every 3 hours and inventory totals for every seller on every listing, you will get the most complete picture possible of your brand on every major online marketplace.

Of course, the most important step in removing unauthorized sellers is prevention and enforcement. This is where Brand Alignment is leagues above the competition when it comes to enforcement software.

In short, the answer is Yes. 

We have had our 80%-90%+ enforcement rates in every single industry we have worked in. That includes the following:

• Consumer Electronics
• Apparel and Shoes
• Pharmaceuticals
• Health & Beauty
• Sports & Outdoors
• Mobile Phone Accessories
• And More

As you are already aware, each industry has their own bells and whistles. Please contact us if you have any specific questions about enforcement in your industry.

Brand Alignment gives the brand the option of using their own personal cease & desist letters or the option to customize Brand Alignment's proven high performance Cease & Desist letters. These letters were crafted by Intellectual Property lawyers with a full focus on minimizing liability.

Any infringement complaints filed by Brand Alignment are done with the utmost care and transparency. We do not file counterfeit complaints without test buys and approval from the brand. Our trademark complaints are done with caution and all bases covered.

Finally, in this world, anybody can sue anybody for anything. But it does not mean it will stand up in court. There is nothing we can do to prevent frivolous lawsuits from disgruntled sellers. However, we do everything we can to prepare you to have any case against you quickly dismissed. After two years in business, we are proud to say that neither us or any of our brands have had any legal issues of any kind related to our service.

If you are new to shopping for a brand protection 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.

P.S.: Due to the constant changing nature of online marketplaces, our Enforcement Guarantee is a limited time offer.

Please contact us now to ensure you are locked in with your guarantee.