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Metrics type: Cross-Platform Metrics • Category: Marketplace

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At a glance

Live list of ASINs whose Amazon price sits below the corresponding DTC list price by enough to be a textbook MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) violation, real risk: triggers reseller pricing wars, brand-policy enforcement, and partner-channel disputes. The price-only subset of catalogue drift, weighted by reseller-attack severity.

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Calculation

Calculated automatically from your Amazon (Selling Partner) data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

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Worked example

A US Shopify + Amazon premium audio brand. 38 mapped SKUs. The brand publishes a strict 0% MAP policy (Amazon must equal DTC list at all times). Card snapshot at 14:08 PT on 26 Apr 26 reads 4 ASINs below DTC list price. The drill-down: Five things to notice that are specific to Amazon:
  1. Buy Box loss = sales loss, instantly, and MAP violations are the fastest way to lose Buy Box. Within 4 days of B07AUD0001 sitting 20% below DTC, two arbitrage resellers spotted the gap and listed at 282(justabovethebrand′s282 (just above the brand's 279). The brand’s Buy Box win rate dropped from 94% to 31% on that ASIN. The MAP violation caused the price war it was at risk of.
  2. The headphones drift was a sync failure, not a strategic choice. The DTC team raised the price from 299to299 to 349 on 18 Apr 26 (a planned increase). The Amazon listing wasn’t updated. 6 days of MAP violation before this card surfaced it. The fix took 3 minutes via Manage Pricing; the cost was 6 days of partner-channel friction (the brand’s authorised dealers complained loudly) and a Buy Box war that took 11 days to fully unwind.
  3. Commission erodes 12 to 15% of headline, but MAP issues are partner-relationship issues. Beyond the Amazon-side revenue impact, a brand with a published MAP policy that doesn’t enforce it on its own Amazon listings looks negligent to its authorised dealer network. Brick-and-mortar partners stop investing in the brand if they perceive Amazon as the cheap channel. The fee-vs-margin discussion is downstream; the partner-relationship discussion comes first.
  4. Amazon-first buyers don’t migrate to your DTC site. Some brands tolerate MAP violations because “the customer can buy on DTC for the higher margin”. They don’t. Amazon shoppers buy on Amazon. The MAP violation just hands cheaper inventory to Amazon shoppers who would have paid full price; the DTC margin is unrealised. Always align prices.
  5. Out-of-stock can mask MAP risk temporarily. When a MAP-violating ASIN goes OOS, the violation isn’t visible to resellers (no offer to undercut) so the Buy Box war pauses. The card still flags the price gap (it’s a state, not behaviour-based) but the operational damage is paused. Don’t use OOS as an excuse to delay the price fix; resellers will pounce within hours of stock returning.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

This is the price-only, partner-policy-relevant subset of catalogue drift. Pair with these to act:

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Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in Amazon Seller Central: Amazon does not enforce or surface MAP policies (Amazon’s stance is that sellers set their own prices; MAP is a brand-policy and partner-channel issue). The closest views:
  1. Pricing → Manage Pricing lets you see your current price per ASIN. Compare manually to your DTC list price.
  2. Inventory → Manage Inventory shows the Featured Offer (Buy Box) Price. If yours is below this and below your DTC list, that’s the dual signal of MAP violation plus reseller activity.
  3. Performance → Pricing Health Dashboard flags ASINs that Amazon thinks are not competitively priced (Amazon’s measure, not yours). Sometimes correlates with the upper end of MAP violations but is unreliable.
Why our number may legitimately differ from anything you’d build manually: Cross-connector reconciliation: This card is inherently cross-connector. It does not exist without both an Amazon connector AND a DTC connector. The reconciliation IS the metric.

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Amazon doesn’t enforce MAP. Why is this card useful? Because MAP is a brand-policy issue, not an Amazon issue. The card surfaces ASINs where your Amazon price contradicts your published MAP, exposing you to: (1) partner-dealer complaints (“you said no one would price below MAP”), (2) reseller pricing wars (resellers spot the gap and undercut both channels), (3) Buy Box loss (the war erodes your win rate), (4) brand-perception damage (Amazon as the cheap channel signals to authorised dealers you’re not committed). Amazon doesn’t enforce MAP; you do, and this card is the operational tool for that enforcement. My MAP threshold is 0% (exact-price-match). How do I configure that? Toggle the threshold in Nerve Centre → MAP Settings. Set to 0% (or any number from 0 to 25). The card recomputes against your configured threshold; alerts fire only on actual violations of your policy. Most brands set 5%; brands with strict published MAP policies set 0% and adjust their internal pricing workflow to match. My DTC site has a flash sale at 30% off. Does that count as a MAP violation on the DTC side? Toggle whether the card uses DTC “list price” (compare-at price) or current sale price as the comparator. Most brands set “list price” (the full retail) as the source of truth; that way temporary DTC sales don’t generate false MAP violations against Amazon. If you set “current price” as the comparator and run an aggressive DTC promo, the card will flag every ASIN with no Amazon-side equivalent, which is operationally useful as a reminder to mirror the promo on Amazon if intended. FBA fees and commission, do they affect MAP detection? No. MAP is a list-price comparison, before any fees. Amazon’s referral fee and FBA fee are downstream economic concerns. A brand that wants to “make MAP work after fees” is conflating list price with margin; the right framing is “list price = published policy” and “margin = internal cost question”. Pair with Net Revenue for the margin question, separately. ACOS, does fixing MAP violations help? Yes, indirectly. MAP violations trigger reseller pricing wars, which trigger Buy Box loss, which raises ACOS (clicks don’t convert when you don’t hold the Buy Box). Fixing MAP violations reverses this chain: Buy Box recovers, ACOS drops. Cross-check on Amazon Ads ACOS. Don’t expect immediate ACOS recovery; the cycle takes 7 to 14 days to fully unwind once the price gap closes. Multi-marketplace, does the card aggregate UK + DE + FR + IT + ES? Yes, with one comparison per marketplace-DTC pair. If you have a UK Shopify store and amazon.co.uk + amazon.de + amazon.fr connectors, the card runs three comparisons (one per marketplace) against the UK Shopify list price, with FX conversion. For brands with separate DTC stores per geography, configure the per-region pairing in Nerve Centre → MAP Settings. Settlement timing, does this affect cash flow? No directly. MAP is a state alarm, not a cash-flow metric. Once you fix a violation, no immediate cash impact occurs (the affected orders had been settling normally, with the brand earning lower margin per unit). The downstream improvement is recovered Buy Box and recovered margin, which flows through normal 14-day settlement timing. Pair with Pending Settlement only when reasoning about cash-flow during a Buy Box recovery. Return-window confusion, do return-window mismatches between Amazon and DTC count as MAP violations? No. MAP is purely a price comparison. Return-window differences (Amazon’s standard 30 days vs DTC’s potentially-longer policy) sit on description-drift detection in Catalogue Drift vs DTC, not here. Why isn’t the Shopify-Amazon channel app a useful tool for MAP enforcement? Because the channel app is a publishing tool with partial-sync defaults. It pushes price from Shopify to Amazon, but with delays and with optional fields that brands often misconfigure. Most brands using the channel app have intermittent MAP violations because of sync-timing artefacts: a Shopify price change at 14:00 BST may not propagate to Amazon until 16:00 BST, and during those 2 hours resellers can attack. Even if you use the channel app, this card is the only reliable way to monitor whether MAP is currently honoured. Why does today’s number sometimes flip between 0 and 3 within an hour? Because both sides update independently. A Shopify price change at 14:00 propagates to Shopify webhooks within minutes; Amazon’s reflection of the equivalent ASIN price doesn’t update until you push or until the channel app syncs. The card may briefly flag MAP violation between 14:00 and (say) 14:35, then drop the flag when the Amazon side catches up. Wait an hour after any DTC bulk price update before triaging; you’ll otherwise be chasing transient violations that are about to self-resolve.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

MAP Violation Risk (vs DTC) is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Amazon (Selling Partner) and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.