Getting Started with Trinity · Chapter 12 of 15
MAP notices: what to expect
If you sell any of the nearly 700 brands on the platform with a MAP policy (SIG, Leupold, Trijicon, Holosun and Nightstick among them), you have agreed to their minimum advertised price whether you read the policy or not. The brands enforce it with software that reads gun.deals, GunBroker and your product pages, and with staff who email you.
What a notice looks like
An email from the brand's brand protection team naming your store, the SKU and UPC, the price they saw, the MAP, and attaching the policy and the current price list. The policy sets the penalty: typically one business day to correct an online price or two weeks on the Do Not Sell list for a first violation, 30 days for a second, 180 days for a third, permanent after that. On the Do Not Sell list, every distributor stops selling you that brand.
What causes it on a Trinity store
Almost always a product whose MAP value is missing or stale in the feed data. Trinity never shows a price below the MAP it has on file; when the file has no MAP, the item prices like any other. Manufacturers raise MAP on a date, distributor feeds lag, and a rifle advertises at its old number for a few days. It has happened to our own store: the feed carried no MAP for one rifle, the site priced it from the markup, and the brand's team emailed within the day.
What to do
- Reply the same day that it is corrected. Do it before you argue about anything.
- Send us the notice and the price list. We load the manufacturer's current MAP by UPC across your catalog, fix the GunBroker listings, and confirm every item is at or above MAP on the site, in the feeds and on GunBroker. The fix took about an hour.
- Keep the brand's MAP rule set the way the brand wants: at MAP, or "Email for price" for brands that forbid showing a lower number anywhere.
What the platform does for you
- MAP is applied after your markup on every surface: site, feeds, GunBroker. Your feeds send MAP, or an "Email for price" label, never the lower number.
- Offers are turned off on GunBroker for brands that forbid them.
- Sales below MAP are still allowed where the policy allows it: a private emailed quote is not an advertisement. That is how the dealers compete on MAP brands.