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Research

Two questions every brand asks.

Written from our own scans and from how the law actually treats price in each market. Published only where a real scan or a real statute supports it.

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Research paper — published

Unauthorised sellers: what they actually cost, and how to remove them.

Most brands cost the problem as lost revenue, and most of those numbers double-count — the seller is moving genuine goods you already sold. What is really lost is margin mix, pricing power, partner goodwill and advertising efficiency. The paper separates five seller types that look identical on a listing, builds an honest cost model, and sets out a remediation ladder that starts in your own distributor contracts rather than on the marketplace.

Read the paper

The unauthorised-sellers paper

Unauthorised sellers: what they actually cost, and how to remove them.

Twenty-four pages: the seller taxonomy, the cost model component by component, the INFORM and DSA disclosure routes, test-buy and lot-code method, the Otter template for US enforcement, selective distribution in the EU, and a ninety-day programme.

Download the PDF

Opens the paper and your save-as-PDF dialog — 24 pages, laid out for print.

The optimisation view in Merqi: price dispersion across retailers for the same reference

Research paper — published

Holding a price position across five markets, and the lever in each.

A brand selling into Europe, the UK, the US, China and India has a different instrument in every one. In the US a unilateral minimum advertised price policy can be published and enforced. Across the EU the lever is selective distribution and the monitoring the guidelines expressly permit — you decide who is authorised to sell you, and on what standards. This piece works through the instrument market by market, and the practices that quietly cross into price fixing.

Read the paper

The MAP paper

Minimum Advertised Price policies in the US and EU.

Twelve pages on where the line sits in each regime, the case law behind it, the fined fact patterns from 2018 and 2025, two comparison matrices and an implementation programme with metrics.

Download the PDF

Opens the paper and your save-as-PDF dialog — 20 pages, laid out for print.

Status

Where these stand.

Both papers are published

Read them on the site or download either as a PDF. They are written as companions.

Every figure traces to a scan

No market-size statistics, no borrowed numbers. If we cannot reproduce it, it does not go in.

Not legal advice

The MAP piece explains how the rules are structured. It is not a substitute for your own counsel.

Method

How the data is produced.

How listings are matched

Listings are tied to your catalogue on product title and SKU, retailer by retailer.

Accuracy and what we flag

98–99% on matched listings. Low-confidence rows are flagged in the deliverable, never hidden from it.

Compliant by design

Merqi observes and reports the shelf. Monitoring and reporting are lawful across every market we cover.

Twenty minutes is usually enough to know.

Twenty minutes on what is happening across your retailers. Or start with a free audit of a handful of your own listings — completely free, and back with you within two days.

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Merqi
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Somebody else is setting your price on six retailers.

Merqi is the enterprise platform that tracks who sells your products, who holds the buy box, and at what price — across the retailers and marketplaces you actually sell through.

Retailers monitored

The problem

Right now, a seller you never appointed a reseller with your stock a marketplace trader an account you cannot name somebody undercutting you is costing you revenue and losing you customers.

They win the sale on a listing you built, to a customer who believes they bought from you. If that order arrives late, damaged or grey-market, you lose a customer and the revenue both — and neither ever appeared in your channel to begin with.

Undercutting is only the visible half. The rest of the damage never announces itself.

And it is never just one thing

Seven ways your distribution leaks.

A lost buy box is the one you can see. Merqi reads all seven on the same scan, so the damage you have not noticed shows up beside the damage you have.

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What it costs you

Why one row matters

Four in five sales never see a second seller.

The featured offer is not a ranking, it is the default. The other sellers sit behind a link most shoppers never open, and on mobile they are not on screen at all. So when someone else holds the box on your listing, the page still converts — for them, on your product, at a price you did not set.

What a lost box actually costs

The size of the prize

10–30%+

revenue our clients can recover

The margin is already yours. Somebody else is taking it.

Every buy box lost to an unauthorised seller is a sale made at a price you did not set, on a listing you paid to build. Recovering those listings, closing the coverage gaps and holding distributors to their terms is where the range above comes from.

See what one scan cycle found

Indicative range. What Merqi recovers for your catalogue depends on how many of your listings are contested and how far price has drifted — the first report tells you which.

How it works

Three workflows, one ledger.

Every finding starts as a row in the same scan. What changes is the question you bring to it.

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What you get

Everything happening on other people's shelves.

The first two are what most brands come for. The rest is what they did not know they were missing — and the platform they read it all in.

See everything the platform reads

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On one client account, Merqi reads 4,196 listings across 78 active retailers every day and names every seller holding a box that should have been theirs. Catalogues are unlimited — this is one brand’s shelf, not our ceiling.

July 2026 monitoring cycle, as of 31 July. Platform shown through the H.Koenig account, with H.Koenig's permission, for data demonstration purposes.

Case study and research

What the scans keep turning up.

One client's ledger, and the two questions every brand asks once they have seen it.

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Go deeper

The rest of it, in detail.

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The monthly newsletter.

The latest intel on how buy boxes are set, new legislation across the jurisdictions we cover, how to enforce MAP legally, and breakdowns on dealing with rogue sellers — and how to approach each of them using the right ecommerce intelligence.

We’ll use your details to respond to this request. See our Privacy Notice.

Twenty minutes on your shelves. Then decide.

Twenty minutes is usually enough to tell whether Merqi has anything to say about your shelves. Or send us a handful of listings first and we will scan them, completely free, with the findings back inside two days.
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Download the PDF

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Chapters

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Legal

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No sheets in this export yet.

A workbook is generated at the end of each scan cycle. The first one appears here once your first scan completes.

Get a free audit of your listings

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We’ll use your details to respond to this request. See our Privacy Notice.

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Pick a time

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Open the calendar

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Buy-box hold rate

Alerts by kind, by week

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Twenty minutes is usually enough to know.

Twenty minutes on what is happening across your retailers. Or start with a free audit of a handful of your own listings — completely free, and back with you within two days.
Book a demo