Run a search for your own product name on Amazon right now. Not your brand name — the exact product title. Count the sellers.
Most CPG founders have never done this. The ones who have are usually surprised: five, seven, sometimes a dozen listings for the same SKU, several of them priced below the minimum advertised price the brand set with its actual retail partners.
This isn’t a hypothetical. It’s one of the most common findings in an Ecommerce Gap audit, and it’s almost always invisible until someone goes looking for it.
Why nobody catches this by accident
A brand’s P&L doesn’t have a line item called “unauthorized resellers.” The damage shows up as something else entirely: a slightly lower average selling price on the flagship SKU, a Buy Box that flips away from the brand’s own listing more often than expected, a retail partner quietly asking why their shelf price looks high next to Amazon.
Each symptom gets investigated separately, if it gets investigated at all. Pricing thinks it’s a promotions issue. Retail thinks it’s a partner-relations issue. Nobody connects the three symptoms back to the same root cause, because nobody is looking at the marketplace listing as its own P&L line.
The math that actually matters
Two numbers matter here, and almost no CPG brand tracks both in the same place:
- Number of active sellers on your core SKUs. Not just “is it grey market” — literally, how many distinct sellers show up on the listing this month versus last month.
- How many of them are pricing below MAP, and by how much.
Multiply that gap by estimated monthly unit volume on the listing, and you get a number that’s usually large enough to change how a leadership team prioritizes its quarter. It’s rarely small.
Where this actually comes from
Unauthorized resellers get inventory from a small number of predictable sources: overproduction sold off through liquidation channels, distributors who quietly resell above their allocated territory, or in some cases returns processors reselling “like new” units. Very few brands audit their own distribution chain for these leaks, because it requires connecting retail operations data with marketplace monitoring — two functions that, in most CPG orgs, never talk to each other.
That’s the actual gap. Not a lack of enforcement tools. A lack of anyone whose job it is to look at the whole picture.
What to do this week
You don’t need new software to start. You need one hour and a spreadsheet:
- Pull your top 5 SKUs by revenue.
- Search each one on Amazon and any other marketplace where you have a presence.
- Log every seller, their price, and whether it’s below your published MAP.
- Multiply the delta by estimated monthly units on that listing.
If the number surprises you, it’s not an outlier — it’s the norm. This is one of the clearest forms of what we call Ghost Revenue: demand your retail presence already earned, quietly captured by someone else before it ever reaches your own P&L. It’s exactly the kind of gap the Ecommerce Gap Diagnostic is built to surface automatically, ranked by dollar impact, instead of you doing it by hand every quarter.
Find Your Ecommerce Gap and see what your own marketplace math looks like.
