Guides & Tips

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Topic: MAP Pricing

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

• Topic: MAP Enforcement

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

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

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

• Topic: MAP Monitoring

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

• Topic: MAP Monitoring

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

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

• Topic: MAP Pricing

"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

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

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

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

• Topic: MAP Pricing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Topic: MAP Enforcement

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

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

• Topic: Pricing Policies

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

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

• Topic: MAP Enforcement

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

• Topic: Authorized Sellers

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

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

• Topic: MAP Enforcement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

• Topic: MAP Enforcement

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

• Topic: MAP Pricing

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

• Topic: MAP Enforcement on Amazon