What to do about resellers on Amazon

In Mexico a big part of the consumer economy runs through tianguis, open-air markets that pop up for a day and sell everything from produce to furniture. They are wonderful, albeit noisy and chaotic. We buy most of our fruits and vegetables this way, often grown within 30 kilometers of where we live. You can get your grocery shopping done, pick up a dog bed, kitchen containers, or whatever random thing you come across and realize you just need, and finish the morning with tacos on the way out.

And of course, I think about ecommerce in any environment of selling and marketing in real life, including walking through a market while looking for the freshest eggs and lettuce.

At tianguis it’s common to see multiple vendors selling the exact same product side by side. Same items, same customer. With no meaningful differentiation the competition comes down to one thing: price. And if you are the brand behind that product, things get more interesting. If I buy a container that cracks after one use, I am unlikely to remember which vendor I bought it from. But I will remember the brand on the package.

In many ways, Amazon can become a digital tianguis. And I am sure you do not want it to be yours.

Why you as a manufacturer should care about resellers

Even if resellers on your listings feel like a minor annoyance, even if you are not actively selling on Amazon yourself, this is a brand control issue before it is a sales issue. Amazon is the largest e-commerce retailer in North America and the most trusted source of product research and reviews for consumers. What your brand looks like on Amazon shapes perception well beyond the platform. And if you are not controlling that presence, someone else is.

Here is what brand equity looks like on Amazon, and how resellers degrade it:

• Product pages and content. Unauthorized sellers can degrade your product pages with weak or wrong titles, missing or off-brand images, outdated claims, and no A+ content. Customers do not know a reseller wrote it. They read it as coming from your brand.

• Search results and catalog organization. The same SKU showing up across multiple product pages, one with a current image and another with packaging from three years ago, creates confusion. While Amazon has gotten stricter with catalog structure, duplicate and fragmented listings remain common for established off-Amazon manufacturers.

• Customer reviews. Product sold without your quality control, warranty, or proper handling generates complaints and negative reviews. In CPG this often looks like product received almost expired or badly packaged. Those reviews attach to your brand, not to the seller who caused them.

• Pricing and promotional control. This one can really compound. When resellers compress price in their race to the bottom, you lose the ability to run a meaningful promotional calendar. Deals, coupons, and seasonal promotions all depend on some control over what the market sees, and especially on historical pricing over the most recent 90 days.

Let me make the pricing piece concrete. Say your usual price is $30 and you want to run a 20% off deal for Prime Day, which would make your promotional price $24. But a reseller has been selling the same product for $25 for a few weeks leading up to Prime Day. Amazon's reference pricing now anchors $25 as the baseline, not your $30. Which means your 20% off has to come off of $25, not $30, to qualify as a valid promotion. That is $4 per unit in margin you have to give up just to have promotional visibility during the event. Multiply that across your catalog and volume, and a Prime Day that was supposed to be a growth moment becomes a margin loss event caused by pricing you did not set.

Beyond brand equity, there are two other reasons this should be higher on your priority list than it probably is.

First, sales. If you sell on Amazon too, multiple sellers on one listing compete for the Buy Box, and price usually decides it. You can respect your own MAP and lose the Buy Box the majority of the time. Worse, you can pay to advertise a listing while a reseller captures the sale, which happens on listings with multiple child variations. Your ad spend, their sale.

Second, omnichannel MAP erosion. A reseller's low Amazon price becomes the reference point every other channel partner sees. Once Amazon is undercutting, you cannot credibly ask a retail partner to hold the line. They, understandably, will point at the Amazon price. An Amazon problem you did not prioritize can degrade pricing power across the channels that actually carry the bulk of your revenue.

There is also a strategic dimension that is easy to overlook. I have heard from many clients that getting into Costco, Walmart, or other major chains required getting established on Amazon first, as proof of market reception and velocity. Even if Amazon is not your primary revenue channel, it is increasingly a required validation market. What those retail buyers see when they look you up on Amazon matters if you can get inside their stores.

The fundamentals every brand should own

Even if you do not sell on Amazon directly, and even if you work through a limited set of authorized distributors, there are things you should own regardless. These are non-negotiable:

• Brand Registry. The foundation for everything. It establishes you as the trademark owner and unlocks every protection tool Amazon offers. If you do not have a registered trademark, that is step zero.

• GTIN/UPC architecture. Your barcodes must be valid and verifiable against the GS1 registry, or Amazon simply won’t let you set up your products in their catalog.

• Listing and content ownership. Claim your listings. Own the titles, images, bullets, and A+ content. If you do not write your page, someone else will.

• Brand Catalog Lock. Rolled out in 2025, it locks your titles, images, and descriptions so unauthorized sellers cannot edit them. Brand Registry gives you authority. Catalog Lock prevents changes from going live. Note, they are separate actions

Beyond these platform measures, the most important thing to understand is that reseller activity on Amazon is usually a downstream consequence of how your products move through your distribution network. Distribution agreements with loosely defined territories, absent diversion penalties, or weak minimums tend to produce marketplace leakage. The fix for that lives in your distribution contracts and authorized reseller policies, and conversations with them, not in Amazon takedown procedures (exception: counterfeit).

On MAP specifically: a minimum advertised price policy can help, but it is important to know that Amazon does not enforce MAP. Their core interest is offering customers the lowest possible price, which is often in direct contradiction with MAP. So MAP enforcement has to happen outside of Amazon, through your own distribution policies, even when the problem is visible on Amazon. And practically speaking, the stronger basis for action against unauthorized sellers is authorization itself, meaning the right to exclude sellers who are not authorized, rather than the price they are selling at.

Options: ownership or distributor partnership

When it comes to how you actually operate on Amazon, there are two main models:

The ownership model means you sell on Amazon through your own account. You control price, content, and advertising, and you capture the channel sales directly. The cost is operational: you have to staff and run the channel, or bring in a partner to do it on your behalf. But you own the decisions, and data.

The partnership model means you work with a single authorized distributor who handles operations for you. This is faster to set up and requires less internal capability, and it is reasonable when Amazon is a small share of revenue. The key word here is single. Multiple authorized sellers still compete for the Buy Box and get rotated by Amazon even when all of them observe MAP, so adding more authorized sellers reduces your control rather than increasing it.

The scenario you want to avoid is: an open field of unknown resellers on listings you do not control, at prices you did not (digital tianguis).

Where you might be right now

In my experience, most brands dealing with reseller issues fall into one of three situations.

1) You do not sell on Amazon, but unknown resellers do. This is often discovered late. The signs are a fragmented catalog, duplicate listings, inconsistent pricing, and content that is outdated or does not represent the product well. If this is you, the priority is high. The sequence is to enroll in Brand Registry, claim and consolidate the catalog, correct the barcode architecture, rewrite and lock the content, and then determine your operating model while establishing authorization and distribution controls upstream. Until these steps are taken, other channel decisions are effectively being made for you by third parties.

2) You sell on Amazon but consistently share the Buy Box with resellers. You may or may not know who they are, but the listings regularly carry multiple sellers. The ongoing effects are lost sales, advertising waste, Buy Box loss, and gradual MAP erosion across other channels. This is a distribution problem more than it is an Amazon problem. The fix is to identify where the inventory is coming from, tighten distribution agreements, enforce authorization uniformly, and apply gating or serialization where it makes sense. A shared Buy Box is rarely a stable state, usually it tends to get worse over time. So it’s better to resolve it proactively, than tolerate it.

3) You sell on Amazon, hold the Buy Box nearly all the time, and see only occasional small resellers who carry limited inventory and do not significantly undercut price. You already own your content, hold Brand Registry, and control your catalog. This is a monitoring situation. It should not be ignored, because a small reseller can grow and a passive one can become aggressive, but it does not warrant priority over revenue-generating work. Periodic monitoring, enforcement when a seller crosses a defined threshold, and attention to price undercutting, or larger inventory holding by a reseller as escalation signals is the right posture.

The cost of sitting on it

Resellers on Amazon are one of those problems that feel manageable until they are not. It feels manageable and gradual, until it becomes a bit issue that is complex and expensive to solve.

If any of what I described sounds familiar, this is work I do regularly with CPG manufacturers. Not just the Amazon-side fixes, but helping you think through the distribution and authorization structure that prevents the problem from recurring. If you want to talk through where you are and what makes sense as a next step, reach out.

Saludos,

Irina