MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) monitoring is a process brands use to track and enforce their policies, ensuring that authorized retailers do not advertise their products below a certain point. Brands track their SKUs across online stores and marketplaces, monitor prices, and communicate with sellers.

Why is it essential for brand value protection? How does it help in avoiding violations? You will learn everything about e-commerce MAP monitoring in this article. 

What is MAP?

MAP stands for Minimum Advertised Price and defines the lowest price at which a retailer should sell a manufacturer’s product. For example, a manufacturer produces a product and sets their MAP at 10$. Retail companies that wish to sell that product agree to sell for at least 10$. Otherwise, they will be violating the MAP policy.

The reason MAP agreements are established is to maintain a consistent price across different outlets.

What is a MAP Policy

It is a guideline set by manufacturers for the lowest price at which a product can be advertised. It is important to note that this pertains to advertised prices, not the actual selling price. A MAP policy is used to ensure an even playing field amongst retailers that want to drive margin or volume, whilst ensuring that the brand’s product is not devalued by a constant price war.

Why is MAP Monitoring needed?

Well, setting a MAP agreement is not only about the price; it also plays an important role in a brand’s reputation. Because at some outlets, the price of the product will be cheaper than the others, which can lead to a bad reputation in the e-commerce marketplace.

Here are the most common reasons for MAP monitoring:

• Price consistency: Ensures that all authorized retailers sell products at or above the agreed-upon minimum price, avoiding undercutting.
• Protecting brand value: Avoid being labeled as cheap due to the number of unauthorized discounts.
• Improving Profit Margins: It makes sure that both retailers and manufacturers maintain healthy profit margins.
• Market Insights: Provides brands with visibility into competitive pricing trends and retailer compliance.
• Large competition: Allows smaller manufacturers to compete with larger suppliers.

The more brands follow up on prices and monitor MAP, the more resellers will feel responsible to keep the price at decided rate.

Benefits of MAP Monitoring

When you follow the right steps, monitoring brings a lot of benefits to the brand. These benefits can be availed:

MAP monitoring protects your margins

When you pair your MAP policy with MAP enforcement, MAP monitoring protects your margins by keeping your prices where they’re supposed to be.

Ensures Fair Competition

It keeps all authorized sellers on the same ground by stopping undercutting. 

Protects Brand Value

MAP monitoring prevents products from being sold at very low prices, which makes your brand look cheap. So it helps you protect your brand value.

Detects Unauthorized Sellers

It identifies marketplaces or resellers that are not authorized by the manufacturer to sell their products.

How does MAP Monitoring Work?

MAP monitoring is an ongoing process. It’s not like a quarterly review or a yearly review. To do MAP monitoring effectively, you have to keep track of your prices on many different platforms (like Amazon, Shopify, Walmart, Google Shopping) and follow up with sellers who violate your policy.

Track Online Stores and Marketplaces

Your MAP policy defines the lowest price your sellers can publicly display. Depending upon how you have written the MAP policy, it may govern the in-cart prices that they can show the people as well. But if you ignore the prices in your policy, and once resellers figure that out, they will start ignoring the policy altogether.

The more sellers you have, the harder it gets to keep track of your prices. Especially when you add unauthorized sales to the mix.

So, you need to monitor online stores and marketplaces more often to ensure there is no such problem occurs.

Check your pricing constantly.

Real-time pricing data is essential for MAP monitoring. If you’re manually checking your data or using map monitoring software that only pulls data once a day, you’re leaving a huge opportunity for resellers to violate your price undetected.

So it becomes essential to monitor your data many times in a day, so you don’t leave any gap in the market.

Checking MAP Compliance Manually

To check MAP compliance manually, the users have to go through multiple steps:

• Finding all the sellers and checking their advertised prices.
• Contacting and warning the violators.
• Re-checking if resellers have changed the advertised prices.
• Following up with the sellers who have not increased their prices again.

While smaller companies may work with fewer retailers, manually doing it is 20 times more time-consuming. 

Automated MAP monitoring

To track MAP compliance automatically, e-commerce companies use price monitoring software or data-extraction tools. These tools automatically gather e-commerce data and deliver it whenever needed.

They automate these processes.

• They provide a list of resellers that offer your products or services.
• Flagging up the prices that violate your MAP policy.
• Telling you how much your goods or services cost in each marketplace.

For example, Proxying.io offers proxies that work with your monitoring prices. Let’s go through how proxies help in MAP monitoring.

Note: This article is just for informational purposes. Always consult with an able lawyer before enforcing or making any pricing policy.

MAP Monitoring With Proxies

Proxies play an important role in monitoring software. Here’s how proxies help:

• Avoiding IP blocks: Monitor tools send lots of requests to web servers as they have to scrape a lot of data hourly, which can lead to a permanent ban. Proxies rotate IPs, making requests appear like they’re from different real users.
• Geo-targeting & Localization: Some sites show different places, ads, or availability depending on the user’s location. Proxies help software collect region-specific data.
• Maintaining Accuracy: With a stable proxy session, software can collect data consistently without interruptions.
• Accessing restricted content: Retailers may block automated traffic or specific IP ranges. Using residential or ISP proxies makes monitoring look like normal user traffic.

Automation allows building a stable and reliable price monitoring process. Combining it with proxies gives a reliable and uninterrupted monitoring experience.

Conclusion

MAP monitoring helps keep brands and manufacturers in good relationships with authorised resellers and marketplaces. It helps you identify what marketplaces might be selling a brand’s items without authorization or violating MAP policies.

MAP agreements are essential for a brand’s reputation and fair competition across different distribution channels.

Lastly, Automated price monitoring allows gathering large amounts of information from different e-commerce marketplaces quickly than manual MAP monitoring