Map monitoring has become an essential practice for brands that sell through resellers and retailers. With over 6 million 3rd party sellers on Amazon alone, the risk of violations, counterfeits, and price inconsistencies across channels continues to rise.
This comprehensive guide will walk you through everything you need to know about Minimum Advertised Pricing (MAP) monitoring. You‘ll learn:
- What is MAP and map monitoring?
- Is it legal to enforce map policies?
- How to manually or automatically monitor pricing
- Key benefits for your brand protection, profits and ad compliance
- Pro tips for setting up effective map monitoring
By the end, you’ll be equipped to coordinate your distribution channels and protect both pricing and brand reputation through map monitoring systems.
The Origins of Minimum Advertised Pricing Policies
Before diving into the intricacies of monitoring MAP policies, it helps to understand the context of their conception.
MAP policies emerged as a legal alternative to Resale Price Maintenance (RPM) agreements which more aggressively dictated retail prices sellers must stick to. After RPMs faced increased legal scrutiny in the 1960s under antitrust regulations, brands conceived MAP policies as a softer mechanism to influence pricing control.
MAP policies began gaining adoption through the 1970s and 80s across electronics, publishing, athleticwear and other brand-focused industries. They allowed manufacturers to police only the advertised prices of resellers rather than outright fixing retail prices.
This nuance helped MAP policies comply with the Colgate doctrine which permits sellers to refuse dealings with any resellers that don’t follow suggested policies. So long as the pricing agreements are voluntary and bilateral, they avoid being considered anti-competitive price manipulation by regulators.
Fast forward to today where 63% of national brands now employ some form of MAP to coordinate ecommerce channels according to surveys. As online distribution fragments through countless resellers, more brands adopt MAP guardrails to reign in discounting and prevent brand dilution.
What is Minimum Advertised Pricing (MAP)?
Minimum Advertised Pricing (MAP) is a policy set by manufacturers or brands that specifies the lowest price at which resellers can advertise and sell their products. This allows brands to have better control over product pricing across different sales channels.
For example, if a product‘s MAP is set at $100, a retailer cannot display that product below $100 on their website or other promotional materials. This helps manufacturers prevent steep markdowns and inconsistent discounting across stores.
MAP policies are a type of vertical price restraint used by brands to coordinate pricing across their distribution and retail channels. It contractually obligates resellers to maintain certain price floors to keep brand value intact.
Benefits of MAP Policies
When implemented thoughtfully, MAP policies unlock several advantages:
- Consistent premium branding across channels
- Limited pricing wars between competing retailers
- Reduced chances of devaluation though overdiscounting
- Lowered odds of gray market diversion
However some resellers argue MAPs reduce their ability to leverage promotions to beat competitors. But most brands consider the protection MAPs offer against damaging price erosion worth these tradeoffs.
What Does Map Monitoring Involve?
MAP monitoring refers to the ongoing process of tracking product pricing across distribution channels to ensure compliance with MAP policies.
It allows brands to:
- Identify resellers advertising products below the mandated minimum prices
- Detect unauthorized sellers liquidating products well below MAP
- Enforce MAP by contacting violating resellers
- Ultimately maintain consistent brand image and profit margins
This requires manually checking numerous reseller websites which can be extremely labor intensive. Automated monitoring systems are far more efficient as we‘ll explore shortly.
Are MAP Policies Legal?
Yes, MAP policies are legal under antitrust laws in the USA when all parties consent to the pricing agreement. It does not directly dictate the actual selling price, only the advertised price.
Distributors found advertising below MAP can face penalties or lose supplies. However, resellers still have leeway to discount actual selling prices to customers through direct communication.
But advertised prices must comply or brands can refuse to continue supplying goods. This preserves margins without being considered price-fixing.
The Colgate doctrine permits sellers to choose distributors they want to work with including policy pricing requirements. But broadcasts through advertising are more heavily regulated.
Over a series of legal cases, MAP policies have been repeatedly upheld falling under permissible vertical price restraints. So their legal standing is now firmly established.
How Does the Manual Monitoring Process Work?
The manual way to monitor MAP involves regularly:
- Identifying Violations: Search for pages advertising products below MAP pricing
- Documenting Proof: Take screenshots evidencing policy breaches
- Contacting Resellers: Inform them prices must be updated to comply
- Following Up: Check if prices were corrected
- Enforcing Policy: Refuse supply if pricing not updated per agreement
While feasible for small brands with few resellers, this approach does not scale. It relies entirely on tedious manual searching across countless online stores. Automation becomes necessary as we‘ll explore next.
How to Automate MAP Monitoring with Web Scraping
Automating map monitoring alleviates the headaches of manual policing. Software solutions leverage data extraction through web scraping to programmatically gather and analyze pricing from reseller sites.
Web scraping services offer configurable scrapers to target key sites. This allows continuous, real-time monitoring of policy violations to enforce MAP across channels.
Here is an overview of the automated scraping process:
- Select Sites to Monitor: Choose which reseller sites to gather pricing data from
- Configure Extraction Rules: Set filters to pinpoint relevant product pages with pricing info
- Schedule Ongoing Scrapes: Continuously extract updated price data per your schedule
- Export Pricing Data: Output data files (JSON, CSV, etc) containing price info for analysis
- Identify Violations: Programmatically flag any scraped prices below your set MAP
- Enforce Policy: Contact or deactivate violating resellers based on alerts
This eliminates the need to manually check each reseller. And the scheduled extraction ensures you always have the latest pricing data.
Some web scraping tools also assist with downstream analysis, reporting, and enforcement workflows. This provides a complete automated MAP monitoring solution.
Advanced Use Cases
Sophisticated brands are taking automation further by incorporating more advanced analytics, AI, and big data capabilities:
- Pricing Anomaly Detection – Machine learning algorithms to model expected price distributions and automatically flag outlier pricing deviations needing investigation
- Predictive Policy Violation Risk – ML models estimating reseller violation probabilities based on past behavior data to focus auditing on high-risk cases
- Reseller Sales Estimation – Estimate future sales volumes for resellers based on historical sales data and economic indicators to calculate fair MAP thresholds
- External Data Enrichment – Incorporate contextual signals like oil prices and currency swings to better interpret pricing shifts
But accessing quality data remains the foundation. And web scraping provides the scalable data feeds to power these more advanced applications.
Key Benefits of Monitoring MAP Policies
Rigorously monitoring minimum advertised pricing provides 3 major benefits:
1. Preventing MAP Violations
Automated monitoring lets brands rapidly identify and resolve policy breaches before they escalate. This protects pricing and prevents inconsistent discounting.
Bulk data extraction quickly reveals unauthorized resellers liquidating products well below MAP. Or it exposes authorized retailers quietly cutting prices.
By detecting violations early, you can enforce MAP through warnings and supplier restrictions. This prevents unfair price wars between channel partners.
2. Protect Brand Reputation & Prevent Counterfeiting
Monitoring product pages also maintains branding control beyond just pricing:
- Brand Misrepresentation – Catch unauthorized uses of logos, images etc
- Inaccurate Product Data – Fix incorrect titles, descriptions, specs etc
- Counterfeit Listings – Detect fake or tampered products early
This further safeguards brand integrity as you expand to new third-party channels. It also prevents counterfeiters from quietly selling knockoff products and damaging perception.
Counterfeiting costs the global economy $4.2 trillion per year and continues rising over 30% annually. Early detection before fake product listings gain traction is crucial to safeguarding brand equity.
And when brands show dedication to continually monitoring resellers, fewer gray market sellers even attempt undercutting MAPs illegally given the increased chances of getting caught.
3. Verify Ad Compliance Across Channels
MAP monitoring also assists ad compliance for PPC and other online ad campaigns.
Advertisers can confirm product sites their ads link to are not breaching MAP. This prevents wasting ad spend driving traffic to heavily discounted listings eroding margins.
For large media buyers with volumes of ever-changing ads, keeping tabs manually becomes impossible. Automated monitoring verifies ads stay MAP compliant across accounts and platforms.
Implementing Effective MAP Monitoring
Here are crucial tips for deploying map monitoring:
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Prescout Sites Thoroughly – Identify all resellers and retail sites to monitor based on distribution contracts and product searches. Account for site deletions, additions, or mergers over time.
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Focus Automation Initially on Largest Resellers – Kick off automated monitoring on channel partners with widest reach like Amazon, Walmart, Target before expanding deeper.
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Supplement Scheduled Scrapes With On-Demand Spot Checks – Occasionally perform one-off scrapes on concerning sites needing immediate policy verification.
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Enforce Consequences Consistently – Follow set protocols for enforcing MAP breaches uniformly across violating resellers to be fair.
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Compare Pricing Across Channels – Use dashboards to contrast pricing between resellers and spot check outliers.
Effective MAP monitoring takes consistency, organization and staying on top of channel partner activities. But the brand and revenue protection it delivers is invaluable given the chaos of decentralized online distribution.
