This is the complaint I hear most often from CPG founders who have just started taking Amazon seriously. Three sellers they have never heard of are listed against their own ASIN. One of them is sitting on the Featured Offer at a price that undercuts their own store. Their retail buyers have noticed. Their distributor is asking questions. And every report they file with Amazon comes back with nothing.
The frustration is justified. The strategy is wrong. Reporting a seller for price is the one move that is guaranteed not to work, and in the UK it can land you in worse trouble than the discounting ever did. The leak is almost never on Amazon. It is inside your own distribution, and that is where it gets fixed.
Your Listing Is Not Actually Yours
The first thing to accept is structural. An ASIN is a product record, not a storefront you own. Anyone holding genuine units of that product can create an offer against it. Amazon built the marketplace that way deliberately, because it drives price competition and that is good for the customer. You are not the owner of the listing. You are one seller on it, and if you are new to the channel you may not even be the biggest.
The Featured Offer, which most people still call the Buy Box, is awarded rather than owned. Amazon weighs landed price, fulfilment method, delivery speed, seller performance and availability. Price is usually the most decisive of those, which is why a reseller working on a 6% margin out of a unit they bought on clearance will beat you on a product you make.
That list of factors is also the good news. Four of the five are things you can control without touching your price.
Amazon Does Not Enforce Your MAP Policy
This is the part brands spend months failing to accept. Amazon does not recognise or enforce minimum advertised price policies. It is not a party to your reseller agreement, it does not monitor compliance with it, and reporting a seller solely for pricing below your MAP does not trigger any action. There is no queue you are waiting in. The ticket was never going anywhere.
Amazon acts when behaviour breaches one of its own policies. Authenticity and intellectual property. Product condition misrepresentation. Listing detail page violations, which includes a reseller editing your copy or images. Brand Registry protections. Seller conduct and fulfilment failures. Pricing only becomes actionable where it collides with something Amazon already cares about, and your margin is not on that list.
Every hour spent reporting a reseller for price is an hour not spent finding out which of your accounts sold them the stock. One of those activities has never worked. The other works every time.
The UK Trap Nobody Warns You About
Most of the advice circulating on this topic is written for American brands, where MAP policies are a normal commercial instrument. In the UK and across the EU, setting or policing the price a reseller charges is resale price maintenance, and it is unlawful. This is not a technicality in the small print. It is one of the restrictions competition regulators treat most seriously.
The Competition and Markets Authority has fined suppliers for exactly this behaviour. Roland was fined 4 million GBP, Korg 1.5 million GBP and Dar Lighting 1.5 million GBP, all for restricting online discounting by their dealers. The pattern in those cases is instructive, because the evidence was usually an email from a sales manager asking a retailer to put their price back up. That is all it takes.
So when a founder tells me they are drafting a MAP policy for their UK wholesale accounts, my answer is to stop and get a competition lawyer in the room first. You have real levers over distribution. Price is not one of them, and reaching for it is how a margin problem becomes a regulatory one.
Where The Stock Is Actually Coming From
Unauthorised sellers are not manufacturing your product. In the overwhelming majority of cases they are selling genuine units that you sold to somebody else. When I was running Liquiproof across three thousand retail doors, every single instance of unexpected online discounting traced back to a decision made inside our own distribution, not to a bad actor on the internet.
The common sources repeat across categories. A wholesale account over-ordered to hit a volume break and cleared the surplus through a broker. A distributor sold into a territory you never authorised. A retailer offloaded short-dated or delisted lines rather than writing them off. A liquidator bought a pallet of customer returns and refusals and put it straight onto Amazon. Promotional stock, samples and influencer seeding units found their way into a clearance channel. None of that is piracy. It is the predictable consequence of selling volume into accounts whose exit routes you never asked about.
Which is why the diagnostic is physical rather than digital. Buy your own product from the seller holding the Featured Offer. Read the batch code, the lot number and the best before date on what arrives. Match it against your production and despatch records. In a few days you will usually know the account, the shipment and sometimes the specific invoice. That is the moment the problem becomes solvable, because you are no longer arguing with Amazon. You are having a commercial conversation with a customer.
The Four Levers That Actually Work
1. Control the listing before you control the sellers
Brand Registry is the entry fee for everything else. Without it you cannot protect your copy and images, you cannot access the brand protection tooling, and you have no standing when a reseller rewrites your detail page. With it, a reseller altering your listing becomes an actionable violation rather than an annoyance. Transparency, which now covers 88,000 enrolled brands and has verified billions of units, lets you put a unique code on every unit so Amazon can authenticate items before they ship. Project Zero, used by around 35,000 brands, gives you the ability to remove infringing listings directly instead of waiting on a case. Amazon itself seized more than 15 million counterfeit products in 2024, which tells you both that the problem is real and that the enforcement machinery exists when you give it something to act on.
2. Gate the brand so new offers cannot appear
Brand gating restricts who may create an offer against your ASINs, which closes the door rather than chasing people through it. You need active Brand Registry enrolment with verified ownership, a registered trademark, a professional seller account in good standing and a clean violation history. Approval usually takes three to five weeks. It costs the brand owner nothing. The practical advice is to apply for five to ten priority ASINs rather than the whole catalogue, because focused applications are approved more readily and your hero SKUs are where the margin damage concentrates anyway.
3. Fix the supply side with terms you are allowed to set
You cannot dictate resale prices. You can decide who you sell to, and that is a stronger lever than most brands realise. Authorised reseller terms can legitimately cover which channels an account may sell through, service and presentation standards, storage and handling requirements, batch traceability obligations, a ban on transferring stock to third parties for resale, and what happens to overstock and short-dated inventory. You can also change how you trade: smaller and more frequent drops instead of volume breaks that create surplus, clearance routes you run yourself rather than leaving an account to invent one, and a buy-back commitment on delisted lines. Get these terms drafted properly, because the line between controlling distribution and controlling price is exactly where the legal risk sits.
4. Win the Featured Offer on the factors that are not price
A reseller with forty units and no replenishment cannot sustain a Featured Offer against a brand that never goes out of stock. Move your hero SKUs to FBA so your fulfilment and delivery speed score beats theirs. Protect your account health. Keep stock depth consistent, because every stockout you have is a free gift to whoever is sitting behind you. Build bundles and multipacks on their own ASINs, which are harder for a reseller holding single units to compete on and give you listings they simply cannot access. None of this requires you to discount, and all of it compounds.
What This Looks Like in Practice
The order of operations matters more than the individual tactics. Brands that start with enforcement burn months and get nowhere. Brands that start with diagnosis usually find the leak inside a fortnight, because there are only ever a handful of accounts large enough to have created the surplus.
So the sequence runs: test buy from every seller on your top ASINs and trace the batch codes. Map each code to an account and a shipment. Get Brand Registry in place if it is not already, and apply for gating on your hero SKUs while the tracing runs. Have the commercial conversation with the account the stock came from, framed around channel terms and stock handling rather than price. Then close the structural gap that created the surplus in the first place, which is almost always your volume break or your lack of a clearance route.
The brands I work with that get this right treat it as a distribution design problem, not a policing problem. Once the supply side is tidy, the unauthorised offers stop reappearing, because there is no longer any stock for them to appear with.
Inside the system
How we build this for brands
The tracing work is the part that used to make this unaffordable, so we automated it. A monitoring agent watches every offer on a brand's ASINs across marketplaces, logs new sellers the day they appear, tracks the Featured Offer and the landed price against the brand's own, and flags the pattern rather than the individual event. Alongside it, a reporting agent reconciles what is selling on Amazon against despatch and invoice records, so when a test buy comes back with a batch code there is already a shipment history to match it to instead of a week of spreadsheet archaeology.
That sits inside the wider profit and leakage reporting we build from live Shopify, Amazon and ad data, which is where channel conflict usually shows up first as unexplained margin drift. Part of this runs live for portfolio brands today; the full system is what we deploy when we take a brand on.
Amazon Growth Audit
Find Out Who Is Really Selling Your Product
I'll map every seller on your ASINs, trace where their stock is coming from, and show you which accounts in your own distribution are costing you margin. You get the leak and the fix, not a lecture on brand protection.
Book Your Amazon AuditFrequently asked questions
Will Amazon remove a seller for breaching my MAP policy?
No. Amazon does not recognise or enforce brand minimum advertised price policies. It is not a party to your reseller agreements and does not monitor compliance with them. Reporting a seller purely for pricing below your MAP will not trigger action. Amazon only acts when the behaviour also breaches one of its own policies, such as authenticity, product condition, listing detail page rules, Brand Registry protections or seller conduct. If you want a seller gone, you need a policy breach Amazon cares about, or you need to cut off the stock reaching them.
Is it legal to tell a reseller what price to sell my product at in the UK?
Setting or policing a reseller's resale price is resale price maintenance, and it is unlawful under UK competition law. The Competition and Markets Authority has fined suppliers for exactly this, including Roland at 4 million GBP, Korg at 1.5 million GBP and Dar Lighting at 1.5 million GBP, all for restricting online discounting. You can set terms around who you sell to, which channels they may use, service standards, stock handling and authenticity. You cannot dictate the price they resell at. Take legal advice before writing any pricing term into a reseller agreement.
What is Amazon brand gating and how do I get it?
Brand gating restricts who can create offers on your ASINs, so unauthorised sellers cannot list against you in the first place. You need active Brand Registry enrolment with verified ownership, a registered text or image trademark, a professional seller account in good standing and no recent policy violations. Approval typically runs three to five weeks, it is free for brand owners, and applications tend to succeed more often when you start with five to ten priority ASINs rather than your whole catalogue.
How do unauthorised sellers get hold of my stock?
Almost always from inside your own distribution. The usual sources are a wholesale account clearing overstock through a broker, a distributor selling into a market you did not authorise, a retailer offloading short-dated or discontinued lines, returned and refused pallets sold on by a liquidator, and promotional or sample stock that was never meant for resale. Buy your own product from the seller holding the Featured Offer and read the batch code. It will usually tell you which account the stock came from.
Does winning the Featured Offer come down to price?
Price is usually the most decisive factor but it is not the only one. Amazon weighs landed price, fulfilment method, delivery speed, seller performance and availability. That matters because it gives a brand levers besides discounting. Selling through FBA, holding reliable stock, keeping account health clean and controlling the listing content all improve your position. A brand that goes out of stock regularly hands the Featured Offer to resellers no matter what its price is.
Should I just undercut the unauthorised sellers on price?
It is the most common reaction and the most expensive one. You end up competing with a reseller whose cost base is your clearance price, on a product you manufacture, and you reset the price expectation for your own retail accounts at the same time. Price competition is the one fight where the reseller has the structural advantage. Fix the stock leak and improve the non-price Featured Offer factors instead.
About the author
Caner Veli is a DTC operator who has helped 350+ brands fix broken growth engines. He built Liquiproof from zero to 3,000+ global retailers in under 6 years. He now runs the same playbook, supported by AI systems he built himself, for DTC and CPG brands.