Frequently Asked Questions

Having your good retailers tell you when someone violates your MAP Policy is helpful, but it’s better to know (and act) before they do. Having us monitor and enforce your minimum advertised pricing will make your customers feel confident that you care enough to take the burden off of them.

The success of a MAP Policy depends on many things: clear consequences, knowing who sellers are, and ultimately, following through. MAPP Trap’s compliance experts can review your process and help you improve your enforcement.

Fast, responsive customer support; reports designed to tell a story rather than just rows of data; dedicated teams for Product Optimization, Merchant Research, Policy Enforcement, and Strategy; and the most thorough seller-contact database in the industry.

Send us a few of your products and we’ll scan your digital shelf (Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and Google Shopping) to show you who’s selling them and at what price. We’ll walk you through the results in a free custom demo, then quote the plan that fits.

Yes. Knowing what’s happening to your products on the digital shelf is essential. Even without a MAP policy, MAPP Trap’s price checking software helps you keep tabs on the 4Ps of marketing: Price, Product, Promotion & Place.

Yes. Our Complete Compliance service creates a custom-tailored strategy based on your objectives and market conditions, then sends and tracks notices, responds to sellers, submits takedown notices, and tracks success.

MAPP Trap has a full-time investigative staff using big data, search algorithms and skip-tracing techniques to identify online sellers: principal names, DBAs, addresses, emails, phone numbers and registered domains, manually verified, standard with every subscription.

Depending on your internal resources and email volume, automation saves time and money. MAPP Trap organizes, creates, sends, tracks and reports on thousands of emails in seconds, with you in control the entire time.

There are many tactics a brand can use to get unauthorized online sellers removed and we understand them all. Depending on your policies and service package, we can give you recommendations to do it yourself, or help get them removed for you.

MAPP Trap’s Policy Enforcer has multiple attorney-crafted templates that include Cease and Desist notices based on Intellectual Property rights infractions. Our managed services department can send them for you.

While most of our clients are brands, we also work with ecommerce retailers and Amazon marketing companies. Some use us to keep an eye on competitors, others to augment their brand offerings.

It can help. Our comparative analytics algorithms cross-reference our seller data with product listings and account lists to help identify which sellers are the same company under different names.

Pricing is based on how many products you monitor, which marketplaces you monitor them on, and any add-ons you choose. Plans start at $200 a month, which covers 50 products on Amazon. Enforcement and CompliancePro are add-ons, and we’ll quote the plan that fits after your free custom demo.

Yes. Every MAPP Trap plan starts with Ecom Watch, our price monitoring and seller identification tool. It shows who is selling your products and at what price, with seller contact details verified by our research team. Enforcement and our other services build on top of it.

MAPP Trap contracts are available on 6-month or annual terms. We’ll confirm the exact match for your plan before you commit.

MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) is the lowest price a brand allows retailers to advertise a product for, online or in ads. It protects your product’s perceived value by stopping resellers from racing each other to the bottom on price. A MAP policy sets that floor; MAP monitoring and enforcement is how you make sure resellers actually stick to it.

MSRP (Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price) is a recommendation. A retailer can price below it without breaking any rule. MAP is a floor with teeth: it’s the lowest advertised price a retailer is allowed to show, and violating it can mean losing access to your products. Most brands treat MSRP as the sticker price and MAP as the enforceable minimum underneath it.

An authorized dealer (or authorized reseller) program is a formal list of retailers a brand has approved to sell its products, usually tied to a signed agreement covering pricing, marketing, and service standards. It’s the foundation MAP enforcement builds on. MAPP Trap helps you identify who’s selling your products without being on that list in the first place.

A MAP violation is any time a retailer advertises your product below the minimum price your policy sets, whether that's the listed price or a strikethrough 'sale' price. MAPP Trap's monitoring software logs a dated, watermarked screenshot as evidence.

We start by identifying who they actually are. MAPP Trap's seller identification unmasks sellers and gives you real contact information, not just a storefront name. A SafeSeller Guide, built with your input, shows which sellers you recommend buying from. From there, most brands combine direct enforcement notices, Amazon's own brand protection tools, and, where needed, legal action. MAPP Trap's Complete Compliance managed services team can handle some or all of it for you.