As online digital shelves grow and evolve, brands face new challenges in maintaining their pricing policies. Minimum advertised pricing (MAP) monitoring helps ensure sellers follow your MAP policy.
However, the key challenge for brands is monitoring and enforcing MAP compliance across hundreds of online sellers and marketplaces. This blog post will outline everything you need to know about MAP monitoring, including its benefits, how it works, and who should use it.
What is MAP monitoring?
MAP monitoring is tracking your product prices across online stores and marketplaces to ensure that your sellers abide by your pricing policies. Through MAP price monitoring, brands can identify and address MAP violations, which is the minimum price for sellers to advertise their products.
Monitoring MAPs offers numerous benefits for brands. It helps to protect your brand’s reputation, preserve brand integrity, create trust between you and your retail partners, and reduce bad consumer experiences. Brands can leverage automation to identify and respond to MAP violations efficiently.
Mostly, the MAP violation platform utilizes crawling technology to scan retailer websites and marketplaces for product listings that violate the mandated MAP prices set by brands. The MAP monitoring platform will generate real-time alerts when it detects MAP violations, allowing your brand to take quick action to get third-party sellers to comply.
How does MAP monitoring work?
Effective MAP monitoring requires round-the-clock monitoring of product prices and seller compliance across all your SKUs and selling channels. Manual tracking is not feasible – you need real-time pricing data and automation. DigiSense360’s MAP monitoring platform is built to automatically track pricing and enforce MAP policies at scale. Here’s how it works:
Data collection
DigiSense360 continuously pulls real-time pricing data from thousands of online sources, including ecommerce sites, marketplaces, and seller APIs. All your authorized sellers and SKUs are monitored.
Policy configuration
Configure your MAP pricing policies and business rules within DigiSense360’s platform. Different policies can be set for different products, brands, sellers, geographies, etc.
Monitoring & alerts
The platform compares real-time pricing against your set policies and alerts of violations and unauthorized sellers. Customizable alerts allow you to stay on top of MAP violations and related issues.
Analytics & reporting
Visual analytics and reports provide insights into pricing trends, policy compliance, violators, etc. You gain a comprehensive view of MAP enforcement.
Corrective actions
DigiSense360 enables you to take corrective actions like removing listings or suspending violators. With 24/7 monitoring of unlimited SKUs across channels, DigiSense360 exposes gaps that allow sellers to violate your brand’s MAP policy and effectively enforce them. This protects your brand reputation and gives you control over your pricing strategy.
Benefits of MAP monitoring
MAP monitoring offers several benefits for ecommerce brands. You can protect your margins by ensuring that your sellers adhere to your MAP policy. These policies ensure price stability so brands and sellers can focus on value, service, and quality rather than destructive discounting.
It also preserves your brand integrity by creating cohesive experiences for consumers. MAP policies help establish consistent brand pricing across retailers. This standardization helps consumers develop a common perception of the brand’s value.
Who should use MAP monitoring?
In case your products are sold on multiple websites or marketplaces, the MAP monitoring platform is a must-have at some point. If there are too many sellers or too many unknown sellers, it increases the risk of MAP violations in a marketplace. Unknown sellers often lack brand commitment or margin considerations that promote MAP compliance. It only takes a few sellers to pull down your brand integrity.
If there is a lot of variance in your product’s price from one seller to another, in that case, you need to put your foot down and establish a lower pricing limit for your products. Subsequently, pricing chaos can quickly alienate distribution partners and even cause them to abandon your brand.
MAP monitoring is designed to help any manufacturer or brand implement MAP pricing for their products. It is particularly beneficial for,
- Large manufacturers with a network of hundreds of online retail partners across marketplaces. Monitoring pricing manually becomes infeasible at scale.
- Premium and luxury brands wanting to maintain pricing integrity and brand equity across channels.
- New brands wanting to establish a consistent pricing policy across sellers during launch.
- Brands in competitive categories like electronics, appliances, apparel, and cosmetics where discounting is prevalent.
- Brands selling on third-party online marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, eBay, etc.
- Brands selling through major retail chains that have an online presence.
Bottom Line
MAP monitoring is a critical component of ecommerce pricing policies. It helps to protect your brand reputation, preserve brand integrity, create trust between you and your retail partners, and reduce bad consumer experiences. You can ensure your sellers follow your pricing guidelines by tracking your product prices and enforcing MAP policy.
DigiSense360 provides the comprehensive and automated MAP tracking brands need. With real-time pricing data across thousands of sources, DigiSense360 empowers you to easily identify and respond to MAP violations before they undermine your strategy. Its intuitive dashboard centralizes monitoring so you can protect pricing in a fragmented retail landscape.
If you need to control MAP enforcement and safeguard your brand, DigiSense360 offers the most effective monitoring platform with robust capabilities and actionable insights to enforce policies at scale so you can focus on driving growth. Get a free demo today!
