Glossary
Plain definitions of the terms that decide whether a brand keeps control of its channel: grey market selling, Buy Box suppression, retailer influence, cross-border leakage and price policy.
Grey market selling is when genuine, authentic products are sold through channels the brand never authorised, often at prices the brand never agreed to and in markets it never intended. The product is real — the problem is the distribution chain.
Because grey market goods are technically authentic, marketplaces rarely flag or remove them. That makes the volume far larger, and far harder to police, than counterfeiting.
Buy Box suppression is when Amazon removes the Buy Box from a product listing entirely, so there is no default “Add to Basket” offer. It typically happens when the product is available cheaper elsewhere.
Amazon monitors pricing across Amazon and external retailers, and external prices can influence Buy Box eligibility. An offline retailer's discount can therefore cost you the Buy Box — and the conversion that comes with it — without warning.
Retailer influence is the analysis of which external retailers and marketplace sellers are driving pricing changes on Amazon or Walmart — identifying which retailer likely triggered a Buy Box suppression or a first-party price match.
It answers a question simple price monitoring cannot: not just who is cheapest today, but whose price actually moved yours.
Cross-border leakage is when inventory intended for one region surfaces for sale in another market, usually at a lower price, undermining the brand's local pricing strategy.
Stock priced for a lower-cost territory competes against your own authorised sellers in a more expensive one, dragging down the local market price and destabilising the Buy Box.
Price erosion is the accumulation of undercuts — from unauthorised sellers, cross-border stock and algorithmic price matching — that pulls the real market price below the price a brand intended.
Each undercut compounds. Once eroded pricing is baked in across channels, it becomes structural and is far harder to recover than to prevent.
A price policy is a brand's set of rules on how its products may be priced by resellers and across channels, protecting margins and channel relationships. In the US this is often a Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) policy.
Most brands have a price policy; far fewer have the visibility to enforce it. Without daily monitoring, violations are invisible until the damage is done — a policy on paper is just a document.
Seller-level sales attribution is the estimation of how many units each individual seller is moving, per day, on a brand's listings — using a confidence-based methodology built on observed stock movements, Buy Box status, pricing position and marketplace signals.
It turns “there are unauthorised sellers” into “these three sellers are material and the rest are noise” — which is what makes enforcement effort worth spending.
A test buy is when a brand purchases its own product from a suspicious seller in order to inspect what is actually delivered — the real condition, authenticity, packaging and source of the goods.
Monitoring detects suspicious sellers, but only a test buy confirms what a customer actually receives. It is what turns a suspicion into enforceable evidence.
An evidence pack is the automatically assembled record of a violation, containing historical pricing, seller identity, timestamps, marketplace information and supporting data.
It removes the manual work of building a case, so enforcement can begin with the evidence already gathered rather than starting from scratch.
An unauthorised seller is any seller listing a brand's products without being on the brand's authorised seller list — regardless of whether the goods themselves are genuine.
They often operate under generic names, cycle through accounts and move across ASINs, which is why detecting them requires continuous monitoring rather than periodic checks.
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