So you will drop a retailer if they sell your product at a lower rate in store even if your advertising it at the MAP price? Because that's the part I perceived as unique to this hobby, not MAP pricing overall...
Every company has its own MAP policy, and each of them is enforced differently. My company, for example, is only concerned with online sales - if one of our brick & mortar retailers wants to sell lower than MAP, we don't care in the slightest. But if one of our online vendors habitually breaks MAP - yes, we will cut them off. Even if they've been purchasing hundreds of thousands of dollars from us.
I get why consumers are salty about MAP, but if I can offer a different perspective: The company I work for has lost literally millions of dollars in revenue because we didn't have MAP. And more than three years after implementing MAP, we're
still digging ourselves out of that hole.
I work for a wholesale gift company; my department specifically sells a brand of high-end French soaps and related products. For years, we advised our retailers to sell our soaps at "Keystone + 10" - basically, double the wholesale cost of the product (keystone) and add 10% to cover additional expenses (primarily freight). This wasn't an enforced MAP - just what most of our retailers had success with, and so that was what we advised our customers to do.
Then
Amazon FBA became a thing. As we weren't a MAP-protected brand, we became very enticing to FBA resellers. The original ones stuck with our advice and listed our products on
Amazon at rates similar to our brick & mortar customers. Then the second wave came. They wanted to capture the buy box, so they listed a little bit lower. Then
Amazon wanted to recapture the buy box from resellers, so they listed a little bit lower. Then new people came in, and they listed a little bit lower still.
It was a race to the bottom, until eventually our products were priced all the way to the bone - if you factored in all of
Amazon's fees and the purchase price of our soaps, the people who were actually selling our products were actually
losing money with each sale. And everyone else, who wasn't willing to lose money on a sale, was instead forced to just sit on their unsold soaps on the hope that the price would come up.
Worse, this also filtered into our brick and mortar shops. Customers would come into the shop, see them listing the soap for 40-50% higher than
Amazon had it, smell the soaps to figure out which ones they liked, and then go home to place the order on
Amazon. So brick & mortar customers were losing sales.
Amazon was losing sales. The people who were capturing sales were losing money. And our revenue absolutely tanked, because everyone was sitting on piles of soaps that they couldn't sell.
And that's when we implemented MAP, and yes - started dropping retailers who violated our policies. I had to send many of those emails myself. Didn't matter how big they were - if they were listing on
Amazon in violation of MAP, their purchasing privileges would be revoked and we would decline and refund any future orders they tried to place.
You live or die based on your perceived value, and failing to maintain MAP is the fastest way to ensure your products lose value and become unsaleable. Once you get to a certain size, if you don't implement MAP you only have so long until retailers will refuse to carry your products.
