Welcome back to The Brand Data Revolution. This week, we’re exploring a topic that is both frustrating and confusing for brands and one that can feel like an endless battle. For many brands, unauthorized sellers are the biggest headache in MAP enforcement. These are bad apples in the bunch; sellers pop up across Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and countless other marketplaces, undercutting pricing, eroding brand trust, and frustrating legitimate retail partners.
But here’s one thing we’ve learned over our extensive experience working with brands: not all unauthorized sellers are bad actors. While some are blatant rule-breakers, others are simply opportunistic resellers, marketplace arbitrage players, or even potential partners in disguise (pay extra attention to the latter; we’ll discuss that in a moment).
If brands want to take back control of their pricing and distribution, it’s imperative to understand who these sellers are, how they operate, and the smartest strategies for dealing with them.
Who Are These Unauthorized Sellers?
Unauthorized sellers come in many forms, but they typically fall into three categories:
1️⃣ The Opportunists – These sellers don’t have direct relationships with the brand but manage to source inventory through third-party distributors, liquidation sales, or even retail arbitrage. They see a pricing gap and jump on the opportunity to sell at a lower price.
2️⃣The Grey Market Dealers – These sellers are often legitimate businesses that obtained inventory through an unintentional loophole – overstock purchases, international shipments, or bulk buys from a distributor with poor tracking mechanisms.
3️⃣The Bad Actors – These are the bad apples that ruin the bunch. These are those sellers that intentionally manipulate listings, misrepresent products, or engage in fraudulent activity. They may sell counterfeit goods, expired products, or tampered items. These sellers not only hurt pricing but also damage the brand’s reputation.
Regardless of which type they are, unauthorized sellers exist because brands lack full visibility into their supply chain or online presence. Unauthorized sellers don’t magically acquire inventory – it comes from somewhere. It’s imperative that brands don’t just accept that these sellers are part of the job and something to be tolerated.
Why Brands Lose Control of Their Distribution
If unauthorized sellers are causing issues, it usually points to a bigger problem: weak distribution controls. Here are some of the top reasons we’ve seen that brands lose control:
Lack of Distributor & Reseller Agreements – Without clear contractual agreements and MAP policies in place, inventory can easily leak into unauthorized channels.
Poor Tracking Mechanisms – Many brands don’t have enough visibility into where their products are going once they leave the warehouse. Are distributors selling excess inventory to unknown third parties? While this is admittedly a trickier part of the compliance and enforcement equation, understanding where products appear online and looking at past orders will help to understand who could be supplying these sellers.
No MAP Enforcement Strategy – Some brands focus only on pricing violations but don’t address the source of the problem: inventory control. Even the best MAP policy won’t work if the wrong sellers are getting the product. MAP enforcement must be paired with a proactive distribution strategy – identifying leak points, tightening agreements, and ensuring only authorized partners can access and resell your products. Without doing this, MAP becomes a reactive effort instead of a tool to protect your brand value and margin.
Sales & eCommerce Conflicts – Sometimes, internal teams are at odds – the sales team wants to move volume, while the eCommerce team is struggling to keep unauthorized sellers off marketplaces. Without teams being fully aligned, leaks happen.
What Can Brands Do?
Now that we know who these sellers are and why they exist, we’d like to offer some suggestions for how brands can work to proactively regain control.
✔️ Tighten Distributor Agreements – World-class MAP enforcement starts with airtight agreements. We recommend you start by working with your legal teams to strengthen contracts, add MAP enforcement clauses, and set clearer guidelines on resale policies.
✔️ Implement Serialization & Tracking – By adding lot numbers, unique identifiers, or other tracking mechanisms, brands can trace where inventory leaks are happening.
✔️ Improve MAP Monitoring – Brands need to not only catch violations but also identify patterns – which sellers are repeat offenders? Where are they sourcing inventory? The best MAP monitoring and enforcement providers will offer tools to track trends over time and customize your reporting to focus on these bad apples once they become a problem.
✔️ Know When to Convert, Not Just Cut – We are firm believers that people are generally good and not all unauthorized sellers deliberately breaking distribution or pricing policies. Therefore, not all unauthorized sellers need to be shut down. Some of them may actually be future retail partners who have legitimate demand for your products and could be successfully brought into an authorized reseller program.
✔️ Leverage AI to Identify High-Risk Sellers – World-class brands use AI-powered solutions (like Pervasive Mind) to spot repeat offenders, track seller movements across marketplaces, and respond faster to violations.
Final Thoughts: The Brands That Win Take Back Control
Unauthorized sellers aren’t going away, but brands that take a proactive, data-driven approach to MAP enforcement and distribution tracking will be the ones who regain control of their pricing and brand reputation.
At Pervasive Mind, we help brands uncover who’s selling their products, where they’re selling them, and how violations are affecting both revenue and retailer relationships. With the right tools and strategy, brands can not only protect their value – but also turn today’s marketplace challenges into tomorrow’s growth opportunities.
📩 Let’s start the conversation.
