MAP monitoring, or Minimum Advertised Price monitoring, is the practice of tracking product prices across various online retailers and marketplaces. This ensures compliance with Minimum Advertised Pricing (MAP) policies set by manufacturers and brands.
In the ultra-competitive, transparent pricing environment of e-commerce, MAP monitoring has become a crucial process for brands looking to exert control over their product pricing and brand image.
This in-depth guide will explore what exactly MAP pricing policies are, why monitoring MAP compliance matters so much for brands today, how effective monitoring is conducted, challenges brands face, and best practices for success.
What is MAP Pricing and Why Do Brands Set It?
First, let‘s make sure we understand exactly what MAP pricing means.
MAP stands for Minimum Advertised Price. It is a predefined pricing policy set by a manufacturer or brand dictating the absolute lowest price at which retailers and distributors can advertise and sell the manufacturer‘s products online and in-store.
If a retailer advertises a product below the set MAP price, it is considered a policy violation. Brands can then take measures to discipline retailers who violate MAP pricing, such as terminating their authorized reseller status.
MAP pricing was traditionally called RPM, or Resale Price Maintenance, until this practice was banned in the United States in a Supreme Court case in 1911. However, the minimum "advertised" price concept was later established as legal, hence the MAP acronym was born.
Manufacturers and brands set MAP pricing to accomplish several strategic and competitive objectives:
Maintain Brand Image and Positioning
MAP policies allow brands to maintain rigorous control over their brand image, prestige, and positioning in the marketplace.
If products are advertised at heavily discounted or highly inconsistent prices, it can significantly dilute the perceived value and exclusivity of a brand in consumers‘ minds. Properly enforced MAP policies ensure products are not undersold.
For example, premium brands like Calvin Klein or Salvatore Ferragamo want to maintain luxury brand positioning. Allowing deep discounting online would undermine that.
Support Brick-and-Mortar Retail Stores
MAP pricing also provides an even playing field between online retailers and physical brick-and-mortar stores. Brick-and-mortar retailers have much higher overhead costs than online sellers.
Without MAP pricing guardrails in place, online-only retailers could drastically undercut viable pricing at brick-and-mortar retail stores. MAP ensures pricing fairness across retail channels.
Prevent Unhealthy Price Wars Between Retailers
In addition, MAP prevents damaging price wars from erupting between online retailers all competing for the absolute lowest price on a product. This race to the pricing bottom drags down margins across the industry.
With MAP, online sellers compete on aspects like customer service, shipping, and policies – not just wild discounting.
Protect Healthy Profit Margains
Furthermore, MAP protects healthy profit margins for both manufacturers and authorized retailers selling their products.
If prices sink too low, it threatens the underlying profitability and viability of selling and promoting the product across the entire distribution chain. MAP allows for profitable pricing levels.
Enable Competitive Parity for Smaller Companies
Lastly, MAP policies allow smaller manufacturers to compete effectively against much larger companies. A small seller can carve out market share by setting MAP to keep larger vendors from using size to undercut them.
As you can see, MAP pricing allows control over brand reputation and creates a level playing field between retailers. That explains why so many brands make use of MAP pricing.
Why You Must Monitor MAP Pricing Compliance
However, simply establishing a MAP pricing policy does not provide value on its own. To achieve the benefits described above, brands must also constantly monitor product listings at online retailers to enforce compliance with their set MAP policies.
Consistent MAP monitoring provides brands with many expansive benefits:
Maintain Your Brand Reputation
Most importantly, MAP monitoring prevents the gradual erosion of your brand‘s reputation, value perception, and prestige that creeps in when products are advertised at prices violating your policies.
Even if an unauthorized retailer is entirely at fault for undercutting your MAP, it is your overall brand image and perception that will suffer in consumers‘ minds from inconsistent discount pricing.
Identify Leaks in Your Authorized Distribution
Often deep discounting is not solely the fault of authorized retailers intentionally undercutting MAP. Unauthorized sellers also get access to product inventory through leaks in distribution channels and then heavily discount.
Careful MAP monitoring helps quickly identify these unauthorized sellers so you can cut off their product supply. According to research, distribution leaks account for 20-30% of MAP violations.
Ensure Retailers Comply With Your MAP
MAP monitoring also ensures that all of your authorized online retailers properly adhere to your pricing policies, providing fair competition between them.
If some retailers break MAP consistently while others work hard to comply, it punishes those respecting your brand‘s policies and creates an unbalanced marketplace.
Build Leverage Against Repeat Violators
In addition, documenting clear evidence of MAP violations through monitoring builds leverage your brand can use against retailers who habitually advertise below your set MAP pricing tiers.
This includes potential termination of authorized retailer status after repeated violations, cutting them off from your products.
Provide Guidance to Uninformed Retailers
Furthermore, monitoring provides opportunities to educate authorized retailers who may be unintentionally violating MAP policies without understanding your rules.
You can use monitoring findings to provide these retailers guidance and give them opportunities to comply before taking more punitive measures. Many retailers will comply if given notice.
Understand Your Marketplace Pricing Trends
Finally, detailed data from MAP monitoring provides excellent market intelligence for brands about pricing trends for your products across retailers and over time.
This helps calibrate MAP pricing tiers optimally as markets change and optimize your sales levels and profitability.
As you can see, regular and consistent MAP monitoring provides expansive benefits beyond just disciplining the occasional policy violator.
How MAP Monitoring is Conducted
Now that you understand why brands monitor MAP pricing, how is this monitoring conducted? Essentially there are two methods:
Manual Monitoring
The most basic approach is manual monitoring of online marketplace prices. This involves brand employees personally visiting product listings for their items across major online retailers.
They then record the live advertised prices they see for later comparison to MAP pricing tiers to identify violations. Examples of steps in manual monitoring:
- Compile a spreadsheet of product listings across targeted retailers
- Visit each listing to record current advertised pricing
- Add notes on pricing elements (sales prices, call for pricing, etc)
- Compare prices seen to MAP tiers to flag violations
- Follow up with non-compliant retailers via email or phone
The Drawbacks of Manual Monitoring
While manual monitoring by visiting listings provides direct visibility into violations, this method has some major drawbacks:
- Extremely time consuming and labor intensive, especially at scale
- Only provides periodic snapshots vs continuous monitoring
- Higher likelihood of human data collection errors
- Harder to analyze pricing trends over time without data
As you can see, manual monitoring is suboptimal for most medium or large brands. This leads to the second approach…
Automated Monitoring with Web Scraping
The most effective way brands monitor MAP pricing today is by automating the process using web scraping technology.
Web scraping utilizes computer scripts to mimic human web browsing. The scripts systematically visit product listings across retailer sites, extract key data like pricing, and import that data into internal databases for analysis.
When configured properly, web scraping solutions provide complete automation of MAP monitoring:
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Compiling Retailer Product Listings – Web scrapers can automatically build a catalog of all retailers selling your products and variant listings.
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Continuous Monitoring – Scrapers continuously run on schedules monitoring prices across all your product listings 24/7.
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Extracting Pricing Data – Custom scrapers extract all relevant pricing information from each product page, including retail, sale, add-to-cart, etc.
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Aggregating Data – Extracted data is aggregated into sortable databases for trend analysis and reporting.
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Automated Violation Flagging – Programmatic rules automatically flag listings violating MAP policies for immediate review.
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Creating Custom Views and Alerts – Dashboards, filtered views, and real-time alerts on violations enable efficient analysis.
This automation allows you to monitor thousands of product listings across hundreds of retailers with minimal effort compared to manual checking.
Key Challenges Brands Face in MAP Monitoring
Automated web scraping delivers the speed, scale, and efficiency needed for robust MAP monitoring. However, effectively monitoring MAP pricing still involves surmounting some key challenges:
Sheer Volume of Product Listings
Major brands often have hundreds of thousands of unique product listings distributed across dozens of authorized online retailer partners. Tracking compliance across listings at this volume is impossible without automation.
Frequency of Online Price Changes
Online prices change far more rapidly than pricing in brick-and-mortar retail stores. E-commerce retailers adjust pricing continually in response to competitors, promotions, inventory levels, and more.
This requires ongoing, continuous monitoring on at least a daily basis to keep pace with marketplace pricing movements.
Ecommerce Site Restrictions Against Scraping
Many top online retailers like Amazon and Walmart technically prohibit scraping in their terms of service, blocking IP addresses detected scraping.
Advanced web scraping solutions use evasive tactics like residential proxies to mimic organic browsing and avoid blocks for successful monitoring.
Incomplete Product Pricing Information
Not all product listings contain the full spectrum of pricing information needed for MAP monitoring in an easily extractable format.
Relevant pricing data like crossed out "was" pricing, adding items to cart to see final price, checking for coupons, and more must be gathered.
Identifying Unauthorized Sellers
A key goal is using monitoring to identify unauthorized 3rd party sellers who have obtained inventory through distribution leaks and may be heavily discounting.
Gathering and analyzing all available seller information assists in tracing and stopping these unauthorized channels.
As you can see, MAP monitoring introduces complex data and technical challenges. The following section covers best practices for overcoming these obstacles.
Best Practices for Effective MAP Monitoring
Given the challenges outlined above, what are some proven best practices brands should follow to build an effective MAP monitoring program?
Utilize Custom Extractors
Build customized extractors tailored to each monitored site to reliably gather all needed pricing elements like retail price, sales price, add-to-cart price, seller information, promotions, etc.
Continuous Monitoring
Set scrapers to run continuously, not just one-off scrapes. Monitor on an ongoing basis to identify daily marketplace pricing changes.
Concurrent Multi-Threaded Scraping
Launch scrapers concurrently from multiple proxies and threads to maximize monitoring speed and scale. Concurrency is key for performance.
Cloud Proxy Infrastructure
Utilize cloud-based proxies for maximizing IP anonymity and avoiding blocks. Local rotating proxies limit monitoring scope.
Stealth Tactics
Employ stealth tactics like realistic browsers, sandboxes, and randomized delays to mimic organic browsing and avoid scraper detection.
Automated Violation Flagging
Configure automated flagging of listings violating MAP pricing against defined policy tiers for rapid identification.
Custom Analysis and Reporting
Build dashboard views, alerts, and reports tailored to your organization‘s specific pricing analysis needs for decision making.
Experienced Vendor Support
Partner with an experienced web scraping vendor who understands your needs and can provide customized solutions and support.
Budget for Ongoing Monitoring
Recognize MAP monitoring as an indefinite, ongoing operational cost rather than a temporary initiative or fixed project.
Why Automate MAP Monitoring with Web Scraping?
Given the challenges of manual tracking, automating MAP monitoring delivers immense advantages:
10x Faster Identification of Violations
Automated scrapers running 24/7 identify violations within hours rather than days or weeks later through manual sampling. Rapid response times increase compliance.
Monitor Thousands of Product Listings
Specialized tools can scale to monitor every product listing across hundreds of authorized retailer partners – impossible to achieve with manual efforts.
Reduce Costs up to 70%
Automation significantly reduces the staffing costs associated with manual monitoring, with estimated savings of 60-70% or more.
Improved Data Accuracy
Scrapers gather complete, up-to-date pricing data without manual collection errors or sampling bias that inject inaccuracies.
Prioritize the Worst Violators
With comprehensive pricing data, brands can programmatically identify the very worst violators for priority enforcement action.
Consolidated Workflows
Automation consolidates monitoring, analysis, reporting, alerts, and enforcement workflows vs disjointed manual processes.
Ongoing Monitoring
Scrapers continuously run to provide true 24/7 monitoring versus periodic manual spot checks. Violations surface faster.
Enhanced Analytics
Large pricing datasets fuel advanced analytics identifying trends, optimization opportunities, and operational insights.
Key Considerations As You Begin MAP Monitoring
As you begin implementing an automated MAP monitoring program, keep these tips in mind:
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Carefully audit your product listings and retailer scope needed before implementation. Attempting DIY manual monitoring inevitably fails at scale.
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Recognize that many top retailers like Amazon and Target technically prohibit web scraping in their terms. Work with an experienced vendor utilizing stealth tactics.
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Budget for initial implementation costs plus ongoing monitoring subscriptions as an essential business expense given the brand control MAP provides.
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Consider the human resources required for responding to identified violations through enforcement actions. Monitoring without follow up is fruitless.
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View MAP monitoring not as a project but rather an indefinite, always-on operational process enabling your e-commerce sales.
Conclusion
In today‘s hyper-competitive, transparent e-commerce marketplace, effectively monitoring and enforcing MAP pricing compliance has become mission-critical for brands.
Automated web scraping solutions provide the speed, scale, and efficiency needed to proactively monitor thousands of product listings across hundreds of authorized retailer partners.
Without rigorous MAP monitoring and enforcement, brands cede control over their pricing and brand reputation in the market. But with the right solutions and processes in place, they can confidently grow online sales through retailers while controlling their brand value narrative.
