You set your RRP at £24.99. Amazon shows £19.87. Three weeks later it's £17.40, and a retailer you actually care about has just rung to ask why they're being undercut by their own supplier's product on Amazon.
So you email Amazon. Amazon doesn't reply, or replies with a help article. And somewhere in your business the sentence gets said that costs brands more than any fee ever will: "Amazon sets the price, there's nothing we can do."
That sentence is a myth. If you've been wondering how to control price on Amazon, the honest answer is that you can, but not by fighting Amazon. The brands that hold their price didn't get lucky and they didn't find a secret setting in Seller Central. They decided who was allowed to sell their product and they removed everyone who wasn't.
Price control is a distribution decision, and it always was.
What's actually dragging your price down
Amazon's systems are built to show the customer the lowest credible price for a given product, anywhere. Its pricing tools crawl the wider web, and third-party sellers run repricers that check each other every few minutes. If your product is available for £18.99 on a discount site, or a wholesaler is clearing pallets through eBay, that number doesn't stay on eBay. It gets matched, then beaten, then matched again.
Now add the buy box. When six sellers sit on one listing, only one of them wins the sale at any moment, and price is the biggest lever any of them can pull. None of those sellers built your brand. None of them paid for your product development or your packaging. Their only way to win is to shave 30p off the current low, so they do, and then the next one does, and the race runs until someone is selling your product at a margin that only works if you never advertise, never innovate and never answer a customer email.
None of that is Amazon being hostile. Amazon is doing exactly what it was designed to do with the distribution you gave it.
The race to the bottom starts off Amazon
Most brands miss where it starts. Your Amazon price usually falls because of a decision made nowhere near Amazon.
You sold a bulk order to a wholesaler at 55% off trade. You cleared old stock through a jobber. A distributor over-ordered and needed the cash back. Every one of those transactions felt sensible on the day, and every one of them put stock into hands whose only route to a sale is undercutting you. Six weeks later that stock surfaces on your own listing under a seller name you've never heard of, and your price is broken in every channel at once, because your bricks-and-mortar retailers can see the Amazon price too.
We took on one consumer brand with 27 sellers on its listings. Twenty-seven. The brand hadn't authorised most of them and couldn't have named half of them. Nobody was minding the content, nobody was advertising and the price was wherever the most desperate seller needed it to be that week.
The product never changed. The list of people allowed to sell it did.
"We can't control it" versus "we haven't tried"
Most brands who say they can't control their Amazon price have never actually tried. Not properly. They've sent a couple of angry emails to sellers who ignored them, concluded the whole thing is lawless and gone back to watching the number fall.
There's a legal nuance worth being straight about. In the UK you can't dictate the price a genuinely independent reseller charges; resale price maintenance is illegal and no serious partner will tell you otherwise. What you can control, completely, is who you supply. You can decide that your product is sold on Amazon by one accountable seller, or two, or by a named list of partners who agreed to standards before they got stock. That's a selective distribution policy, it's legitimate and it's how every brand you've noticed holding a firm price on Amazon actually does it.
Luck doesn't separate the brand at £17.40 from the brand holding £24.99, and neither does category. One of them made distribution decisions. The other made excuses.
What it takes to control price on Amazon
There's no secret setting and no shortcut, just work done in a deliberate order: find out who's actually selling your product, trace their stock to its source, then enforce a policy that decides who gets supplied. Each stage feeds the next, and skipping ahead is why most attempts fail.
The first stage is usually a shock on its own. When brands see a full accounting of their listings for the first time, most find sellers they cannot explain at all, and working out whether that's genuine stock leaking through a channel or something worse takes more than squinting at a storefront name. It's careful evidence work, and it decides everything that follows.
The tracing is the uncomfortable bit. Nine times out of ten the stock on your listing leads back to somebody you invoiced. The wholesaler who orders in strange round quantities. The distributor whose sell-through never adds up. The export customer whose stock keeps landing back in the UK. Fixing it means firm conversations with people who currently give you purchase orders, which is exactly why it's the stage brands quietly skip, and the stage that does most of the work.
Underneath all of it sits Brand Registry, built on a registered trade mark. It won't hold your price by itself, but without it you're a bystander on your own product pages. We've written separately about what Brand Registry actually does, and what it quietly doesn't, because enrolment is where control starts, not where it ends.
The end state is a consolidated, controlled buy box. One accountable seller, whether that's you, your own team or a partner who answers for the number. When we finished with that 27-seller brand there were 2 sellers left: Orellana and the brand itself. With the channel tight, neglected lines in the range went up more than 20% and the brand could fund five figures a month of advertising, because for the first time the margin existed to pay for it. The same control let them open new EU marketplaces without exporting the chaos.
What a controlled price actually buys you
A held price is the thing everything else stands on.
It protects your retailers, who stop threatening to delist you every time Amazon dips. It protects the margin that funds the advertising that grows the listing. Your premium positioning holds too, because UK shoppers read a collapsing price as a verdict on the product. And your ads finally earn their keep, because you're no longer paying for clicks that land on a buy box owned by someone who contributes nothing.
Brands pour money into ads while the channel leaks underneath and then blame the ads. Ads were never going to fix it. A leaking channel isn't a marketing problem, it's a control problem, and control comes first.
Where to start this week
Two things, neither of which costs money.
First, list every seller on your top five listings. If you can't name them all, you've found the start of the thread.
Second, pull your last six months of trade orders and ask honestly which of them could be the source. Round quantities, new customers, export orders that felt slightly too easy.
That's the diagnosis. The cure is a distribution policy with teeth, and if you'd rather not run that fight alone, it's the first thing we fix for every brand we take on. Some brands want a partner who takes full responsibility for the channel, which is a different conversation again, and we've written honestly about what exclusive distribution should actually take to earn and why we built Orellana as both distributor and agency.
If you can't name every seller on your listings, that's usually where the price leak starts. You know the two places to look. The diagnosis is free. It's the £17.40 that's expensive.
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