"How is preventing your competitors from undercutting your price not anti-competitive? It's preventing the one thing that causes competition to lower prices."
Because Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) policies are one of the most common practices used by the large majority of consumer goods manufacturers and brands, especially in the electronics or higher end goods space.
Every retailer who is an authorized seller of a brand that employs a MAP policy has agreed to advertise/list/publish the product at a price no lower than MAP, or risk losing their reseller status. Note that I did not say they can't sell for a lower price, just that they cannot show a lower price to the general public to elicit a sale.
MAP is not just beneficial for the brand though, who's products remain priced accordingly to limits the brand has set; it's beneficial to the retailer who can count on a minimum set margin and not have to worry about being undercut by another retailer. It also benefits the end consumer by ensuring the retailer and brand retain enough margin on the sale to facilitate after-sale support and service as well provide the means to stay in business along with the benefit of helping to protect resale values (for applicable products). MAP policies themselves are fully legal under current anti-trust laws (in the US).
Yes, it most definitely is true. The company I work for designs and sells somewhat niche products geared towards photographers which we sell via our own website, retail camera stores and on Amazon. Since we do not allow our retailers to sell on Amazon so we are the only official seller of our products on the marketplace.
We ran a sale for Labor day where we discounted our products on our website, but did not discount them on Amazon. Within 36 hours of the prices being reduced on our website we started to receive notifications from Amazon that our "offers" were ineligible due to not having the lowest price. Upon checking the listings, they had removed the buy box, essentially making it a multiple-click process for anyone to actually buy the products.
This happens anytime we, or any of our retailers that have an ecommerce presence discount our products without discounting them on Amazon. It's ridiculous.
As someone who's created their own theme for VSCode this could've saved a ton of time.
However after trying to just change a couple colors I'm already extremely frustrated since I can't actually type a hex code in the color picker without it hijacking what I'm typing and adding characters, even when I'm trying to delete. The only thing that works is if I paste in a hex code. I'm not sure if this is an attempt at autocompleting the hex codes but whatever it is, it's maddening.
Because Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) policies are one of the most common practices used by the large majority of consumer goods manufacturers and brands, especially in the electronics or higher end goods space.
Every retailer who is an authorized seller of a brand that employs a MAP policy has agreed to advertise/list/publish the product at a price no lower than MAP, or risk losing their reseller status. Note that I did not say they can't sell for a lower price, just that they cannot show a lower price to the general public to elicit a sale.
MAP is not just beneficial for the brand though, who's products remain priced accordingly to limits the brand has set; it's beneficial to the retailer who can count on a minimum set margin and not have to worry about being undercut by another retailer. It also benefits the end consumer by ensuring the retailer and brand retain enough margin on the sale to facilitate after-sale support and service as well provide the means to stay in business along with the benefit of helping to protect resale values (for applicable products). MAP policies themselves are fully legal under current anti-trust laws (in the US).