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Guides & Tips

Learn about MAP policies, best practices and more.

Guides & Tips

How MAP Guides a Competitive Pricing Policy

This guide explores how embracing a strategic competitive pricing policy, combined with the power of Minimum Advertised Price (MAP), can transform your brand's market standing and ensure lasting profitability.

  • Topic: MAP Policy

Guides & Tips

How MAP Pricing Affects the Four Ps of Marketing

You can pour time and resources into your marketing strategy, but unauthorized sellers, gray-market listings, and price-slashing resellers create chaos that threaten to unravel your efforts. The ripple effect touches all four Ps of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion.

  • Topic: MAP Pricing

Guides & Tips

A Strategic Guide to Protecting Price and Profitability Amidst Tariffs

Changes in U.S. trade policy, particularly regarding tariffs and the elimination of the de minimis exemption, directly impact businesses with international supply chains. Learn how to protect profitability and deter unauthorized sellers.

  • Topic: MAP Pricing

Guides & Tips

Authorized Reseller Violations: Rethinking Strategy and Tactics in MAP

Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) policies and authorized reseller strategies are the cornerstones of modern brand protection. They're the digital ramparts that keep your products safe from price erosion while protecting your brand's reputation.

  • Topic: MAP Enforcement

Guides & Tips

Where is That Google Shopping Discount Coming From?

Ever wonder why your products sometimes show a discount on Google Shopping, even though you’re not offering one? This can cause unintended MAP violations and create unnecessary headaches for everyone (retailers, brands, and consumers).

  • Topic: MAP Pricing

Guides & Tips

Why Your Brand Needs a MAPP Company

Minimum advertised price policy (MAPP) is the glue that holds the economy of your business together, and a bussdness that operates without a MAPP company faces serious risk.

  • Topic: MAP Policy

Guides & Tips

The 2025 Guide to MAP Pricing (Minimum Advertised Price)

E-commerce is a crowded space. By some estimates there are between 12 million and 24 million online sellers worldwide.

  • Topic: MAP Pricing

Guides & Tips

3 Keys to Online Brand Protection: Objectives, Strategy, and Tactics

Discover how objectives, strategy, and tactics unite to protect your brand online.

  • Topic: MAP Enforcement

Guides & Tips

MAP Policies and Holiday Sales: The Discount Dilemma

Implementing MAP holidays can give brands and their resellers the opportunity to capture a larger share of the market, which could mean higher profits for all parties involved.

  • Topic: MAP Policies

Guides & Tips

The Impact of the Election on MAP Policies and Brand Owners

As elections approach, the business landscape can shift dramatically, particularly for brand owners navigating the complexities of Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) policies.

  • Topic: MAP Policies

Guides & Tips

Amazon MAP Monitoring: Where Brand Protection Starts

Maintaining brand integrity and profitability is paramount. One of the biggest challenges facing brands is enforcing Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) policies.

  • Topic: MAP Monitoring

Guides & Tips

A Strategic Overview of Unauthorized Sellers, Authorized Reseller Agreement, and MAP Policy

Learn how to create a strategic authorized reseller agreement and effectively enforce MAP policy for your brand.

  • Topic: MAP Monitoring

Guides & Tips

The Importance of MAP Monitoring for Brand Protection

One of the most effective strategies to achieve this and protect your bottom line is through rigorous MAP monitoring, also known as MAP price monitoring.
 

  • Topic: MAP Monitoring

Guides & Tips

Pricing Transparency: How MAP and MSRP Affect Customer Trust

Price transparency, especially through MAP and MSRP, holds significant influence over customer perception and trust. 

  • Topic: MAP Pricing

Guides & Tips

MSRP vs. MAP: Which Is Better For Your Brand

"Determining the correct retail price for a product is extremely important. Too high and nobody may buy it. Too low and it may be viewed as a..."

  • Topic: MAP Pricing

Guides & Tips

How to Stop Unauthorized Sellers on Amazon

Unauthorized sellers on Amazon list your products without your permission, at a discounted price, and sometimes with inauthentic goods. This can harm your brand’s reputation, lessen your profits, and more.

  • Topic: Unauthorized Sellers

Guides & Tips

5 Ways to Enforce Pricing Integrity with Strategies Beyond MAP Policies

Implementing MAP policies is a great way to enforce pricing integrity across your e-commerce brand, and it’s recommended that all companies selling online have a MAP strategy in place.

  • Topic: MAP Enforcement

Guides & Tips

Is MAP Pricing Legal? A Guide for Companies

Uncover insights on MAP pricing's legality, obstacles, and benefits for brand image protection, fair competition, and enhanced customer services.

  • Topic: MAP Pricing

Guides & Tips

Are All Online Sellers Authorized Sellers?

When it comes to online brand protection, there are two proven strategies (of many) - MAP and ARP. Brands usually adopt both, but what are they and what do they protect?

  • Topic: Unauthorized Sellers

Guides & Tips

How to Send Cease and Desist Letters to Unauthorized Sellers: Beyond DMCA

Cease and desist letters to unauthorized sellers are key to protecting your brand and IP rights, though there are some pros and cons to consider.

  • Topic: Unauthorized Sellers

Guides & Tips

Leveraging Technology: 5 Steps to Automating MAP Enforcement with MAPP Trap

Discover the power of MAPP Trap in automating MAP policy enforcement. Learn the 5-step guide to streamline your process, save time, and safeguard your brand's integrity effortlessly.

  • Topic: MAP Enforcement

Guides & Tips

How to Create an Effective Authorized Reseller Program (ARP): 5 Tips for Success

Building and maintaining a strong network of Authorized Reseller Partners can ensure that consumers purchase your products from companies that reflect your values.

  • Topic: Authorized Resellers

Guides & Tips

Strategies for Effective Omni-Channel Product Monitoring

Ecommerce is vast, with Amazon as one piece. Brands need more than pricing for consistent representation; they must see the whole digital landscape.

  • Topic: Product Monitoring

Guides & Tips

Unlocking the Future of Ecommerce Compliance with Machine Learning and AI

Ecommerce growth underscores the need for brand compliance. With digital market complexities, ML and AI are pivotal for brand integrity and ROI.

  • Topic: MAP Compliance

Guides & Tips

Harnessing Big Data for MAP Enforcement

In today's competitive marketplace, the right pricing strategy is essential. Enter Big Data, a vast reservoir of digital insights.

  • Topic: MAP Enforcement

Guides & Tips

8 Reasons to Not Depend on Retailers to Enforce MAP Policies

MAP policies help ensure that products are consistently priced online, preserving brand reputation and value, but relying on retailers to enforce these policies is risky.

  • Topic: MAP Policies

Guides & Tips

How to Handle Requests for Exceptions to Your Reseller Pricing Policy

Navigating pricing policy complexities, brands face managing exceptions. When resellers request Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) policy exceptions, careful handling is key.

  • Topic: Pricing Policies

Guides & Tips

Amazon and the First Sale Doctrine: Protecting Your Brand

Understanding the implications of the First Sale Doctrine, its limitations, and methods to navigate it are crucial for protecting your brand on Amazon.

  • Topic: Unauthorized Sellers

Guides & Tips

Common Challenges That Brands Face When Enforcing MAP

Building brands involves challenges like product development, marketing, and sales. Protecting brand value requires focused thinking and decision-making.

  • Topic: MAP Enforcement

Guides & Tips

What Due Diligence Should You Do Before Signing a New Authorized Reseller?

Performing due diligence before partnering with authorized sellers is crucial to protect your brand's value, integrity, and MAP policy compliance.

  • Topic: Authorized Sellers

Guides & Tips

Brand Power: Mastering Pricing, Distribution, and Marketing for Emerging Consumer Brands

In today's dog-eat-dog retail world, new brands often struggle to get sales reps, attain shelf spaceshelf-space and compete against bigger, well-established players.

  • Topic: MAP Strategies

Guides & Tips

Beyond Profits: Why Brands Need to Consider More Than Just Margins

Brands must balance short-term profits with long-term equity by considering discounts' impact on perception, pricing, and distribution strategy.

  • Topic: MAP Enforcement

Guides & Tips

Building Strong Relationships with Authorized Resellers: The Key to MAP Compliance and More

There’s no better way to successfully enforce a policy than to build a strong foundation of mutual respect and understanding among all of the involved parties.

  • Topic: MAP Compliance

Guides & Tips

How to Set Up an Authorized Reseller/Dealer Program

An authorized reseller program is an agreement between a brand and its resellers that allows the sellers to distribute products in exchange for certain benefits.

  • Topic: MAP Policies

Guides & Tips

What To Do When An Amazon Discount Causes a Reseller to Violate MAP Without their Knowledge

Amazon-provided discounts can pose a challenge to MAP enforcement efforts, as resellers might unintentionally violate MAP without realizing it. What can you do?

  • Topic: MAP Enforcement

Guides & Tips

Can Selling Direct-to-Consumer Improve MAP Compliance?

When a brand opens up its DTC channel, it gives itself a direct presence alongside resellers, making the brand more visible to customers and sales partners. 

  • Topic: MAP Compliance

Guides & Tips

How to Get Online Content Taken Down for Copyright Infringement

If unauthorized sellers are using your marketing materials, you can file a DMCA takedown notice for copyright infringement to pull down the offending content.

  • Topic: Unauthorized Sellers

Guides & Tips

How Long Does it Take to See Results After Implementing a Minimum Advertised Pricing Policy?

Successful brands see a benchmark 75% reduction in MAP violations by known, authorized sellers by month three, and near full compliance within six months.

  • Topic: MAP Policies

Guides & Tips

Fifteen Tips to Help Identify Unknown Sellers

Brands may face challenges identifying their sellers when trying to enforce their online policies. Learn some identification tips for your unknown sellers here.

  • Topic: Unauthorized Sellers

Guides & Tips

How to Diagnose and Respond to Merchant Churn

It's important to have good online exposure to ensure that your products are meeting brand standards. Read more about managing relationships with online merchants.

  • Topic: MAP Enforcement

Guides & Tips

How MAP and Pricing Strategies are Used By Luxury Brands

In today’s business world, it's simply impossible to stay competitive without a strong online presence. While it’s great to have products sold on reputable e-commerce sites, you also need to ensure they are playing by your rules.

  • Topic: MAP Pricing

Guides & Tips

The Complete Guide to MAP Compliance

Brands create minimum advertised price policies (also known as MAP policies) for many reasons. Detailing best practices and why compliance is important, this guide covers it all.

  • Topic: Map Policies

Guides & Tips

12 Ways Merchants Get Your Inventory (And What You Can Do About It!)

In today’s world of ecommerce, it's common across all industries for brands to find resellers with whom they have no relationship listing their products.

  • Topic: Unauthorized Sellers

Guides & Tips

Does Implementing MAPP Help or Hurt Sales?

In this article, we review the main objectives of a MAP pricing strategy to determine if it helps or hurts your brand's sales. Read on to learn more. 

  • Topic: MAP Policies

Guides & Tips

Must-Haves and Best Practices for Creating Your MAP Policy

Besides the potential liabilities of writing a MAP policy that hasn’t been reviewed by a lawyer, there is no one-size fits all policy. Read on for more details.

  • Topic: Creating Your Map Policy

Guides & Tips

Is It Worth Your Time to ID the "First Violator" When Enforcing MAPP Violations?

Are there benefits to identifying your "first violator" versus simply enforcing the policy on every violator evenly and not worrying about who violated first?

  • Topic: MAP Enforcement

Guides & Tips

How to Take the Noise Out of Your MAP Enforcement Monitoring

Depending on your objectives while enforcing MAPP, many sellers may be noise and should either be ignored, or be dealt with in an entirely different way.

  • Topic: MAP Enforcement

Guides & Tips

MAP Policies Can Only Be Properly Enforced with the Right MAP Prices

While MAPP is one of the most powerful brand protection strategies you can employ against price erosion, it’s an unfortunate fact that they don’t always work. But why? 

  • Topic: MAP Enforcement

Guides & Tips

Should You Treat iMAP Differently Than a Traditional MAP Policy?

Brands have different, nuanced approaches to MAP Policies that have caused some confusion. The distinctions between MAP and iMAP policies are laid out in this article.

  • Topic: MAP Policies

Guides & Tips

Why Internal Stakeholders Can Be the Difference When Enforcing MAP Policies

The people that enforce a brand's MAP policy can vary, but at the very least, brands enforcing MAP Policies should make sure certain personnel are involved.

  • Topic: MAP Enforcement

Guides & Tips

A Guide to Un-disguising the Unauthorized Sellers of Ghost Sellerville

If your products are sold online, the odds are that you’ve got a number of sellers you don’t know. Not only are they unauthorized but you don’t even know how they got inventory. At MAPP Trap we call them “Ghost Sellers,” and they can hurt a brand in many different ways. 

  • Topic: Unauthorized Sellers

Guides & Tips

Should You Include All Products in a MAP Policy

There are many things a brand should consider when planning to implement a minimum advertised pricing policy (MAPP). A frequently overlooked question: “Should we MAPP all of our products?”

  • Topic: MAP Policies

Guides & Tips

Why Properly Identifying Product Sources (SourceMap) is Important in Enforcing MAP Policies

Okay, you’ve got buy-in from the whole company to finally enforce your MAP Policy. That’s great. Merchant identification is vital to the successful enforcement of Minimum Advertised Price Policies (MAPP). 

  • Topic: MAP Enforcement

Guides & Tips

What Is Price Erosion and How Do I Stop It?

A proper product pricing strategy is essential to every aspect of the product supply chain. Whether it’s a factory providing the cost of goods, the manufacturer setting the wholesale cost and suggested retail price, or the retailer selling the goods, everyone is affected.

  • Topic: MAP Pricing

Guides & Tips

Eight Things to Avoid When Enforcing your MAP Policy

Your company has finally decided to adopt and enforce a minimum advertised price policy. Perhaps your reason was the unlevel playing field between eCommerce and brick-and-mortar stores.

  • Topic: MAP Enforcement

Guides & Tips

3 Ways MAP Policies Benefit Manufacturers

The faster the technology and consumer adoption of eCommerce evolves, the more important it is for brand-owners to adopt and enforce minimum advertised price policies (MAPP).

  • Topic: MAP Policy

Guides & Tips

How to Write a MAP Violation Notice

"If Thomas Jefferson was writing a MAP policy, it might begin with the words, “All violators are treated equal.” That's because T.J. knows that all sellers must be treated..."

  • Topic: MAP Policies

Guides & Tips

How to Prevent MAP Violations

“Doctors tell us that to stay healthy we need to exercise, eat right, and get enough sleep. Not to oversimplify things, but maintaining healthy online prices isn’t very …”

  • Topic: MAP Violations

Guides & Tips

What Are Unauthorized Sellers?

“On the surface it would seem like having a lot of online stores selling a brand’s products is a great thing. More sellers, means…”

  • Topic: Unauthorized Sellers

Guides & Tips

Brands Beware: Top 10 Online Seller Red Flags

“As more consumers fall in love with the convenience and ease of shopping online, the increased demand has caused rapid growth in the number of online sellers. For brands this can…”

  • Topic: Unauthorized Sellers

Guides & Tips

MAP Pricing Strategies: How to Choose the Right MAP Price

“There have been many articles written about the how’s and why’s of minimum advertised price policies. Very little, however, has been discussed about how a brand should choose the right MAP prices…”

  • Topic: MAP Pricing

Guides & Tips

MAP Violation Enforcement: How to Enforce Your MAP Policy

"Implementing a minimum advertised price policy (aka MAPP) can seem daunting. While there are specific legal implications..."

  • Topic: MAP Enforcement

Guides & Tips

How To Create a MAP Pricing Policy

“A good MAP policy should be user-friendly and easy to understand. And it should cover the following points…”

  • Topic: MAP Pricing

Guides & Tips

How to Enforce MAP Pricing on Amazon

"According to Jeff Bezos, the driving ethos behind the ecommerce behemoth’s success is being 100%..."

  • Topic: MAP Enforcement on Amazon

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  • Unauthorized Sellers

Chat with us

  •   303.670.5111
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