AC2 Sales / Brand protection
We monitor the seller landscape on your ASINs continuously, document what we find, and escalate it — through Amazon where it is an IP matter, and through your supply agreements where it is a pricing one.
Every unauthorized seller who undercuts your price does two things: takes margin out of the listing, and gives your legitimate wholesale accounts a reason to stop buying from you. That much is uncontroversial. What brands get sold, and what actually happens next, are frequently different.
So before describing what we do, here is the constraint everything else sits inside.
Not slowly, not if you escalate well. A MAP policy is a contract between you and your resellers, and Amazon is not a party to it. Enforcing it would place Amazon into resale price maintenance, and it would mean suppressing the lowest price on its own marketplace. Any partner who implies otherwise is either careless or selling you something.
Amazon does act on intellectual-property and policy violations, which is a different problem with a different remedy. We wrote up the distinction in detail: what Amazon removes, and what it won’t.
We use a mix of commercial tools and some we have built ourselves. The specific tooling matters less than the coverage, for one reason.
In our experience MAP violations cluster in off hours — nights, weekends, holidays — on the assumption that whoever monitors the listing has gone home. For most brands that assumption is correct. A price that drops at 9pm on the Friday of a long weekend has three days to pull the rest of the listing down with it before anyone notices on Tuesday.
That is the entire argument for continuous monitoring. Not thoroughness — timing.
Whether a seller complies is mostly a function of whether your product sells at the policy price.
A reseller moving inventory at MAP has a business worth protecting, and complies rather than lose supply. A reseller sitting on stale stock of an oversaturated product was never going to reorder, so being cut off costs them nothing — and dumping the inventory below MAP is the rational move no warning will change.
If the same products keep getting dumped, the question is not why the warnings are failing. It is how much stranded stock is in your channel, how many resellers you authorized for the demand that exists, and whether the listing converts well enough to move product at your price in the first place.
Listing quality, seller count and price integrity are one problem seen from three angles. Most brands staff them as three.
Not a page on your website — terms your resellers have actually agreed to.
Without it the IP half of this does not function.
A policy nobody has ever been enforced against is a suggestion, and your resellers can tell which kind you have.
No, and nobody honestly can. On intellectual-property matters Amazon decides, not us. On MAP, Amazon does not act at all and the lever is your reseller agreements and your supply. We can guarantee that every violation is found, documented and escalated, and that you see the case either way.
The seller landscape on the ASINs we are responsible for: who is on the listing, what they are charging against your policy price, when a new offer appears, and who holds the featured offer. We use a mix of commercial tools and some we built ourselves.
Because violations cluster in off hours. In our experience sellers who break MAP tend to do it at night, over weekends and on holidays, on the assumption that whoever watches the listing has gone home. Monitoring that stops on Friday evening misses the window most likely to be used.
Yes. Without a policy your resellers have signed there is nothing to enforce and no grounds to cut anyone off. Monitoring tells you a violation happened; the agreement is what lets you act on it.
We will look at who is currently on your listings, what they are charging, and whether what you are dealing with is an enforcement problem or a distribution one. You get the findings in writing either way.
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