Protect Your Amazon “Buy” Box and Enhance Your Brand With One Pricing Strategy
November 11, 2019
Between online and brick and mortar retailers, consumers have more purchasing options than ever before. They are, therefore, more likely to engage in price comparison to find the best deal. Maintaining consistent pricing through efficient minimum advertised price (MAP) standards allows sellers to enhance their brand identity. This also decreases the risk of rogue sellers undercutting prices. This practice ensures that when a potential consumer compares product prices, they see the same list price across retailers.
Understanding MAP Pricing
Online merchants have full control of their pricing strategies. They are responsible for ensuring that authorized resellers abide by their established price point(s). Today, online merchants typically sell across multiple platforms, such as Amazon, eBay, and Walmart.com. It can become difficult to enforce MAP for all resellers, especially when a parent company is experiencing exponential product adoption and sales growth. Varying pricing across multiple online retailers can damage a brand’s reputation and may create issues for merchants. This can also affect their resellers, as some retailers police pricing on their own and competitor websites.
For example, Amazon is well-known for scanning its own website to ensure consistent pricing across listings. They also compare prices on Amazon.com versus competitors. Amazon constantly scans competitor’s prices and, when they identify a lower price on a rival’s website, they contact the merchant selling on Amazon. They show the product, the price on Amazon and the price found on a competitor’s website. Merchants are always in control of their pricing strategies on and off Amazon and have the option to ensure consistent pricing across all platforms.
The Affect on the “Buy Box”
That being said, it has been reported that if Amazon finds a lower price on a competitor’s website, and the merchant does not make their pricing consistent after Amazon alerts them of the discrepancy, Amazon makes it harder to find and buy that product on its own website. This essentially penalizes the merchant for offering a lower price on a rival’s website. This can result in lower product rank and losing the “Buy” box, which can ultimately significantly diminish Amazon sales.
Why spend valuable time, resources and manpower to maintain an active database of rogue sellers? Why struggle to ensure consistent pricing across all sellers on all platforms? Online merchants can instead utilize the experience of ZQUARED to optimize their account. We help optimize adherence to MAP standards. ZQUARED ensures MAP pricing compliance by identifying rogue sellers – in real-time – that are trying to undercut our clients’ prices on resale. We then convey this information to our client(s) immediately. The client can then extinguish the detrimental business relationship and maintain consistent pricing across all platforms. This beneficial service helps our client(s) save valuable resources. It also protects their brand and maintains pricing consistency across all platforms. All of this is completed without the worry of losing sales due to retailer retaliation or rogue sellers.
For more information on how ZQUARED can help ensure your brand’s consistency by removing duplicate listings, contact ZQUARED today at 234.978.2733.
About ZQUARED
Our company was born from a service mindset. Our passion is helping you navigate the online retail space in a way never before imagined. With years of industry-leading experience selling on Amazon, our team’s primary goal is helping you achieve success. We have solutions for managing all aspects of the Amazon platform: design, fulfillment, product listings, enhanced brand content, headline and sponsored ads, MAP violations, and even social media marketing. Though understanding all aspects of this sales channel can be overwhelming, we break down every aspect of your brand and what you will need to increase sales on Amazon.