Pricing architecture across channels: one product, many prices
Your own site, three marketplaces, two quick commerce apps and modern trade all want a different price. Without a rule that holds, the cheapest channel sets your price everywhere.
- Differentiate by pack and configuration, not by discounting the same SKU differently across channels.
- The lowest visible price becomes your reference price everywhere, including in distributor negotiations.
- Price to channel cost to serve, so each channel earns a similar contribution rather than a similar price.
- Write the architecture down and give one person the authority to enforce it, or it will not hold.
A brand selling in India today is typically live on its own site, Amazon, Flipkart, one or two value platforms, two or three quick commerce apps, and increasingly in modern trade. Each of those channels has a different cost to serve, a different buyer and a different commercial team asking for a better deal.
Without a deliberate architecture, what happens is predictable. Each channel is priced in isolation by whoever negotiated it, the gaps between them widen, and eventually the lowest price on the internet becomes the price everyone believes is real.
The mechanism that destroys pricing
It rarely fails dramatically. It erodes.
A marketplace runs a funded promotion. A quick commerce platform matches it to stay competitive. A distributor sees the new price, argues that their margin is now unworkable, and gets a better buying price. Some of that stock finds its way to an unauthorised online seller who prices below everyone. Your own site now looks expensive to a customer who has seen all of this in one search.
At no point did anyone decide to devalue the brand. Every individual step was a reasonable local decision. The architecture was missing, so the outcome was set by whoever discounted hardest.
Differentiate by product, not by discount
The most reliable structural defence is to avoid selling identical units at different prices in places the same buyer can see at once.
This means building a pack architecture where channels carry different configurations. A single unit and small multipacks on quick commerce, matching a top up mission. Larger multipacks and value packs on marketplaces, where basket building and free shipping thresholds reward size. Exclusive bundles, sets and subscription formats on your own site, which nobody else can list. Retail specific pack sizes for modern trade.
Now a price difference is explained by what is in the box. That explanation survives a distributor meeting, a screenshot on a WhatsApp group and a customer comparing tabs, which is more than can be said for the same SKU at two prices.
Price to contribution, not to a common number
The second principle is that channels should deliver similar contribution, not similar prices.
Work out the true cost to serve in each: platform commission, fulfilment or shipping, payment costs, returns at that channel’s realistic rate, the advertising required to be discovered there, and the trade margin you concede. These differ substantially. A marketplace order with a high return rate and heavy ad dependence may contribute less at a higher price than a quick commerce order at a lower one.
Once you can see contribution per channel, pricing conversations change character. You are no longer defending a number, you are explaining an economic structure, and the platform’s commercial team can engage with that.
The unauthorised seller problem is upstream
Most brands attack this at the wrong end, spending effort reporting listings and issuing takedowns while the underlying flow continues.
Unauthorised sellers exist because someone sold them stock. That is nearly always a distributor clearing excess, a retailer liquidating slow moving inventory, or an overbuy somewhere in your own channel that had to go somewhere.
The durable fixes are upstream. Batch level traceability so you can identify the source. Distribution terms with real consequences. And most importantly, not pushing more stock into a channel than it can genuinely sell, because overstocked partners will always find a way to convert inventory into cash and that way will be a discounted online listing.
Your own site should not compete on price
Brands often try to make their site the cheapest option to drive direct traffic. It is a losing structure, because marketplaces can fund discounts from a much deeper balance sheet and will simply match.
Make it the best place instead. Bundles and sets that exist nowhere else. First access to new launches. Subscription pricing for replenishable products. Samples with orders. Loyalty value that accumulates. A returns and support experience that is genuinely better.
These are advantages a marketplace cannot replicate with a discount, and they attract the customer worth having, the repeat buyer, rather than the one who was only ever there for the lowest price.
Write it down and give someone authority
An architecture that lives in a shared understanding is not an architecture. It should be a document with the pack ladder, the price for each configuration in each channel, the maximum promotional depth allowed and who can approve an exception.
Then give one person the authority to say no, and make sure that person does not carry a revenue target for a single channel. Otherwise the exception becomes the rule within a quarter, usually in the week before a sale event when the pressure to hit a number beats the discipline to hold a price.