Brand Registry, MAP & resellers
You cannot stop a wholesale customer from selling on Amazon through Seller Central. Amazon does not enforce your distribution agreements, and a buyer who paid you for genuine units is generally free to resell them. What does work is everything you set up before the first purchase order ships: an authorized reseller agreement with teeth, a unit that can be traced back to the account that bought it, and a pack configuration that makes reselling your listing a bad trade for them.
This is the single biggest fear Amazon brands have about wholesale, and it is a solvable one. It is also worth solving with arithmetic rather than anger, because the numbers tell you which accounts are a real threat and which ones you should stop worrying about.
Why a wholesale account ends up on your listing
Start with the money, from their side. Take a product that retails at $29.99 on Amazon and wholesales at $14.00 a unit. A reseller who buys a case, ships it into FBA and undercuts you at $24.99 sees this per unit: $24.99 in, minus a referral fee of $3.75, minus an FBA fulfillment fee of $5.69, minus the $14.00 they paid you. That leaves $1.55 before inbound freight and prep. Thin, but positive, and they do not pay for advertising because your listing already ranks.
Now look at what it costs you. Your own unit at $29.99 nets roughly $9.50 after a $4.50 referral fee, $5.69 in FBA fees, $6.50 of landed cost, $3.00 of advertising and about $0.80 of storage and returns. If you match their $24.99 to hold the Buy Box, your referral fee drops to $3.75 but you lose the whole $5.00 of price, so the unit now nets about $5.25. You gave up $4.25 a unit so that a customer could earn $1.55.
That asymmetry is the whole problem. Diversion is rarely profitable for the reseller and always expensive for you, which is why the fix has to sit at the top of the relationship rather than in a price war.
What Amazon will and will not do for you
Brand Registry gives you tools against counterfeit and against listings that misuse your brand assets. It does not give you a button that removes a legitimate reseller of genuine goods. Reporting an authorized wholesale customer as a counterfeiter when the units are real is both untrue and risky for your own account health.
What Brand Registry does give you is control of the listing content, the ability to see who is on the offer, and access to Transparency, which is the only Amazon program that materially changes the calculation. With Transparency, every unit carries a unique code and Amazon will not let an unauthorized unit through fulfillment. That turns a policing problem into a supply problem: a reseller can only sell what you coded and shipped.
Everything else on the list is contract work. Amazon is not your distribution manager, and treating it as one is how brands end up with twelve sellers on their listing and no paperwork to point at.
The three clauses that do the work
A one-page authorized reseller agreement, signed before the first purchase order is confirmed, solves most of this. Three clauses matter.
Channel restriction. Name the channels the account may sell in, and name Amazon explicitly as excluded unless you grant written permission. Vague language about "online marketplaces" gets argued; naming the marketplace does not.
Minimum advertised price. MAP is a policy about advertising, not about resale price, and that distinction is what makes it enforceable in most of the United States. Set the MAP at your Amazon price, publish it as a unilateral policy, and apply it to every account without negotiating exceptions. A MAP policy you bend for one buyer is worth nothing against the next.
Termination and traceability. State that units carry lot or batch identifiers, that the account agrees not to remove or obscure them, and that a confirmed breach ends the account and any open terms. The point is not litigation. The point is that the first email you send about a violation references a document the buyer signed.
If you are still deciding whether to sell wholesale at all, the trade-offs sit in wholesale for Amazon brands; this article assumes you have decided and want to do it without losing the listing.
Ship them a different unit
The cleanest protection is structural. Wholesale accounts do not need to receive the same SKU your Amazon customer buys.
A retail pack of three at $59.99, a case-ready shelf pack, a different color story, a different scent, a bundled accessory: any of these gives the wholesale account something that does not map to your ASIN. If the unit they hold is not the unit on your listing, they cannot piggyback on the offer, and creating a new ASIN for a pack you did not authorize is far more work than most resellers will do.
This also answers the objection buyers raise. A serious retail buyer does not want to compete with your Amazon price either, because their own shelf price has to survive a shopper with a phone. Offering them an exclusive pack is a selling point, not a restriction. The same logic drives most of the pack decisions in how to sell Amazon products in retail stores.
Test buys and how to trace a unit
Detection has to be routine, not emotional. Two things belong on a calendar.
First, a weekly look at the offer list for your top ASINs. Note every new seller name, the price and the fulfillment method. A seller shipping FBA bought stock somewhere and shipped it in, which means it came from a case that left your warehouse.
Second, a test buy from any new seller. Buy one unit, photograph the outer carton, the inner pack and any lot code, and file it. If you print a batch code on the case and on the unit, and you log which batch went to which purchase order, the test buy tells you the account name in an afternoon. The mechanics of setting that up properly are covered in Amazon anti diversion.
The cost of this program is small. A test buy is $29.99 plus an hour. Compare that to the $4.25 a unit you lose while matching a diverter across a month of sales.
What enforcement costs, and when to let it go
Not every unauthorized seller deserves the same response. Sort them by supply.
If the seller has a handful of units and no reorder path, the offer disappears on its own. Matching their price to punish them costs more than waiting. If the seller has steady inventory, someone is supplying them continuously, and the value of finding that account is the whole margin difference on every unit they will sell this year.
Run that number before you spend a lawyer's time. A diverter moving 200 units a month at a price that forces you to give up $4.25 a unit costs $850 a month, or about $10,000 a year. Terminating the supplying account, which might buy $60,000 a year from you at a $6.60 contribution per unit, is a real decision rather than an obvious one. Sometimes the right answer is a conversation and a corrected pack, not a termination.
The other half of the calculation is what you gain by having wholesale revenue at all. Wholesale contribution is lower per unit than Amazon contribution, but it arrives without advertising and without the concentration risk described in Amazon dependency risk. Losing a good account to protect a listing is sometimes the wrong trade.
Before you sign anyone, it helps to know which kind of buyer you are dealing with. Paste your product link into WholesalePilot and the preview shows the distributors and retailers that plausibly stock products like yours, which is a faster way to tell a genuine retail buyer from an arbitrage account than any questionnaire.
Questions Amazon sellers ask
Can Amazon remove a seller because they broke my contract? No. Amazon enforces its own policies and intellectual property claims. A contract breach is between you and the buyer, which is why the agreement needs to be worth enforcing.
Does MAP actually stop this? MAP stops the price collapse, not the listing. A reseller who holds MAP is far less damaging, because your Buy Box price stays intact and the only loss is the unit margin on sales you would have made.
Is Transparency worth the per-unit cost? If diversion is already happening at volume, yes, because it converts enforcement into a one-time labeling cost. If you have one unauthorized seller with forty units, it is overkill.
Should I just refuse to sell wholesale? That protects the listing and caps the business at one channel. The alternative is selling wholesale deliberately, with a different pack and a signed agreement, which is what the brands in diversify beyond Amazon end up doing.
What do I say to a buyer who asks to sell on Amazon? Say no, in writing, and offer the exclusive pack instead. Buyers who only wanted the arbitrage will stop replying, which is useful information.