Map policy
What Is a Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) Policy?
A MAP policy sets the lowest price at which a reseller may advertise your product. Here is what one contains, what it does not control, and why "advertised" is the word that matters.
A minimum advertised price policy — a MAP policy — is a brand's statement of the lowest price at which a reseller may advertise one of its products. It is one of the most common tools a manufacturer uses to keep a product's price consistent across the retailers and marketplaces that carry it, and it is widely misunderstood, usually in the direction of thinking it does more than it does.
This article explains what a MAP policy is, what it is not, what a workable one contains, and how brands check whether resellers are following it — particularly on Amazon, where the checking is the hard part.
Advertised, not sold
The word that carries the weight is advertised. A MAP policy speaks to the price a reseller shows — on a product page, in a listing, in an ad, in an email — not to the price at which the reseller ultimately sells. A retailer may sell below MAP at the till, or reveal a lower price only once an item is in the cart, without advertising below it. Whether those tactics are acceptable is a matter for the policy's own wording; a policy that says nothing about cart-only prices has said nothing about them.
This is why a MAP policy is usually discussed separately from resale price maintenance, which concerns the actual selling price. How each is treated varies by jurisdiction and by the facts, and a brand writing a policy should take advice on what it is writing and where it will apply. MapProtector, for its part, measures advertised prices and applies the policy a brand configures; it does not decide what the policy may say or whether it is lawful anywhere.
Why brands write one
The reasons are commercial rather than legal, and they are worth stating because they decide what a policy should contain.
- To protect the retailers who invest in the product. A dealer that stocks, demonstrates and supports a product cannot compete with a storefront that does none of those things and undercuts by twelve percent. Without a floor, the investing retailers stop investing.
- To keep the brand's own price position. A premium product that is routinely advertised at a discount stops being premium in the customer's mind, whatever the list price says.
- To make channel conflict visible and discussable. A policy gives a brand and its distributors a shared reference point. "You were below MAP on Tuesday" is a conversation; "your price felt low" is not.
What a MAP policy contains
A policy that can actually be monitored and applied has a small number of components, and the vaguer any of them is, the more of the brand's time goes into arguing about it.
| Component | What it decides |
|---|---|
| Scope | Which products the floor covers — a brand, a product family, or one SKU — and on which marketplaces and for which conditions (new, used, refurbished). |
| The floor | The minimum advertised price for that scope, in a currency. |
| Effective date | From when the floor applies. A policy without a date cannot be applied to a price observed last month. |
| Tolerance | Whether a price a few cents or a fraction of a percent below the floor counts. Many policies allow none. |
| Treatment rules | How shipping, coupons, cart-only prices, bundles and out-of-stock listings are treated. These are where most disputes live. |
| Promotions | Whether and how the brand itself may authorize a lower advertised price for a window — a seasonal sale, a launch. |
| Consequences | What the brand does when a reseller advertises below the floor, in what order. |
The last row is the one most often left implicit, and it is the one a reseller will ask about first.
What a MAP policy does not do
A MAP policy is not self-enforcing, and a document is not a program. Three limits matter in practice.
It does not settle who is subject to it. How a MAP program is structured and what consequences a brand may apply depends on the jurisdiction, the policy design and the brand's relationship with the reseller. Some programs are structured as unilateral manufacturer policies rather than agreements; others sit inside distribution or reseller terms. A storefront that bought inventory through a distributor's distributor, or on the gray market, may have no relationship with the brand at all, and what a brand can say to such a seller — and on what basis — is a question for the brand and its advisers, not for a monitoring tool. MapProtector does not determine whether a reseller is legally bound by a policy; it records the policy the brand configures, the advertised prices it observes and the brand's own compliance decisions. This is why a monitoring program has to keep two facts apart: whether a seller is authorized — a relationship the brand declares — and whether a seller is below MAP — a measurement. See Authorized vs Unauthorized Amazon Sellers.
It does not prove anything by itself. A policy says what the floor is. Establishing that a seller advertised below it, on a date, at a price, requires an observation — a record of what the listing showed, when, and how completely it was read. A brand that cannot produce that record has an accusation, not a finding.
It does not decide the consequence. The policy can name a sequence of steps, but a person has to decide, for each seller and each instance, whether to take the next one. A program that removes the person from that decision is a program that will eventually send a notice to an authorized partner running a sale the brand itself approved.
A policy has versions
Prices change. A brand raises its MAP in April; a seller was observed at the old floor in March. Which floor applies to the March observation? The March one — always. A policy is therefore a timeline of versions, each effective from a date, and every measurement has to record which version it was measured against. A monitoring system that keeps only the current floor rewrites history every time the floor moves, and history that has been rewritten is not evidence.
Monitoring a MAP policy on Amazon
Amazon is where most MAP programs spend most of their attention, for two reasons: it is where the largest number of resellers a brand has never met turn up, and it is where a single product page can show offers from twenty of them at once.
Monitoring means reading those offers on a schedule — every offer on every monitored listing, with the seller behind each one, the price shown, the condition, who fulfills it, and whether it held the Buy Box — and measuring each against the policy version in force at that instant. It also means recording how much of the listing was actually read, because a scan that saw nine of twelve offers cannot say anything about the three it did not see. What that produces is a stream of observations, a subset of which are below the floor, and a smaller subset of which are worth a person's attention.
How MapProtector does that — and what it deliberately leaves to a person — is described on the product page and in the documentation.
Writing a policy that can be monitored
If you are writing or revising a MAP policy with monitoring in mind, five choices make the difference between a policy that produces findings and one that produces arguments.
- State the scope precisely. Name products by identifier, not description. Say which marketplaces and which conditions.
- Date every floor. Keep the old floors on file with the dates they applied.
- Decide the treatment rules in advance. Shipping included or not; coupons counted or not; cart-only prices admissible or not. If you have not decided, say the case is reviewed by a person rather than pretending a rule exists.
- Define how a promotion is authorized. A promotion your brand approved should never reach your own review queue as a violation.
- Separate authorization from compliance. Keep a list of who is authorized, and treat a seller you have not classified as unknown — not as unauthorized — until someone decides.
A policy written this way can be configured in a monitoring tool almost line for line, and that is not a coincidence. The MAP Policy Rollout Checklist walks through the same choices in order.
This article describes how MAP policies are commonly structured and monitored. It is not legal advice. Whether a policy may be applied to a particular reseller, and what may follow from a below-floor observation, depends on the jurisdiction, the policy and the relationship, and is a question for the brand and its advisers.