Distribution issues: Italian Competition Authority fines Morellato for resale price maintenance and online marketplace restrictions

On 31 March 2026, the Italian Competition Authority (ICA) announced that it had imposed a fine of just under €26 million on Morellato, a leading Italian manufacturer of mid-range watches and jewellery. Morellato was found to have prevented distributors from freely determining resale prices and selling its products through online marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay. The decision is a reminder that resale price maintenance (RPM) and online sales restrictions continue to carry a high level of competition enforcement risk.

Morellato’s RPM conduct 

Morellato operated a selective distribution system through which authorised distributors could sell its products. It was found to have controlled distributors’ online pricing in two main ways: 

1. Providing internet policy “guidance” which set maximum discount levels for online sales.
2. Monitoring its distributors’ pricing and penalising those who did not follow Morellato’s instructions.

The imposition of fixed or minimum resale prices is a “hardcore” restriction of competition. It has been an enforcement priority for both national competition authorities and the European Commission in recent years (see our previous article on the Commission’s October 2025 decision against luxury fashion houses Gucci, Chloé and Loewe).

The online marketplace ban

Morellato had prevented authorised distributors from selling its products on online marketplaces since 2018. It sought to justify this restriction on the basis that it helped to prevent counterfeiting and preserve the brand image of its products, relying on the CJEU’s 2017 Coty judgment. As we reported here, the CJEU held in Coty that suppliers of luxury goods can “in principle” prevent authorised distributors from using online marketplaces. Crucially, however, online marketplace bans must be applied in a uniform and non-discriminatory manner and be proportionate to the objectives pursued.

The ICA found that Morellato applied its online marketplace ban in a discriminatory manner, given that Morellato itself made sales through marketplaces such as eBay. Morellato was effectively reserving this important sales channel for itself. The ICA relied on the Commission’s Guidelines on Vertical Restraints, which state that “restrictions on the use of […] online marketplaces are unlikely to fulfil the conditions of appropriateness and proportionality” where the supplier “restricts the use of an online marketplace, but uses that online marketplace itself".

The implications of the ICA’s tough stance are clear: to avoid infringing competition law, suppliers should take care to ensure that any restrictions on distributors’ ability to sell through online marketplaces are appropriate and proportionate.