Welcome back or welcome to our blog. If you’re new here, the goal of this blog is to help brands make sense of one of the most difficult aspects of their ecommerce strategy: maintaining Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) compliance. Most know that this is a crucial part of protecting brand value and market positioning. However, managing MAP policies across dozens of online retailers can be a daunting task, especially when unauthorized price drops and violations occur. That’s where technology comes in. By leveraging the right tools, brands can monitor pricing more efficiently, accurately detect violations, and enforce compliance with far less manual effort.
In this post, we’ll explore how technology can help brands overcome the common challenges of MAP compliance and maintain better control over their online presence but first let’s look at the problems too many brands are facing.
The Challenges of Managing MAP Compliance Manually
For many enforcement teams, MAP compliance is still a labor-intensive process involving manual monitoring, spreadsheets, having to file tickets or grievances with retailers and being behind the 8 ball with reactive responses to violations. This approach is not only frustrating and time-consuming but also prone to errors and inconsistencies.
Limited Scope of Monitoring
Without a monitoring solution in place, brands can only monitor a handful of retailers at any given time. With a limited scope of site monitoring, it becomes difficult for brands to gain a comprehensive view of how products are being advertised across key sites and marketplaces. As more third-party sellers emerge, staying on top of MAP compliance becomes even more challenging.
One tool brand we spoke to recently has hundreds of third-party sellers on Amazon, Walmart, and specialty websites. Manually checking prices on each platform just isn’t feasible and doing so was leading to missed violations by their provider and their team.
Slow Response to Violations
Manual processes often result in slow detection of MAP violations, which means that unauthorized pricing could persist for days or even weeks before corrective action is taken. During this time, price erosion can spread like wildfire, undermining a brand’s perceived value and damaging relationships with compliant retailers.
Without an intuitive solution focused on efficiency, teams are constantly playing catch-up, devaluing their MAP policy and lessening the degree to which retailers will listen.
Inconsistent Enforcement
Manually tracking MAP pricing and compliance leads to sporadic enforcement and a game of whack-a-mole with retailers. Some violations might get addressed immediately, while others might go unnoticed for extended periods, making it difficult to apply the MAP policy fairly across all channels.
When you add up the long-term effects of manual monitoring, it’s a frustrating, demoralizing, confusing and mind-numbing hassle that has lasting impacts to the business not the least of which is the toll it takes on retailer relationships.
How Technology Improves MAP Compliance
So, whether it’s Pervasive Mind or another solution, brands are best suited by having a provider in place. By integrating sophisticated technology into the MAP enforcement process, brands can automate price extraction, gain comprehensive visibility across sales channels, and reduce the time and effort required to manage pricing. Let’s look at each in further detail.
Automated Price Monitoring
At their most basic form, automated MAP solutions are designed to scan the internet for product listings and prices across multiple platforms and websites. It is important to stress right out of the gate, however, that not all solutions are using the most modern extraction techniques and, in most cases, you’re going to get what you pay for.
Today’s solutions use a variety of methods from older web scraping approaches driven by proxies and residential launch points to sophisticated modern algorithms. In the case of Pervasive Mind, we utilize advanced artificial intelligence coupled with human supervision and machine learning to detect where products are being advertised and whether they meet your MAP policy requirements.
Automatic extraction reduces the need for manual monitoring and ensures a broader, more consistent view of product pricing across the market. In short, the right solutions will give you the best read on the market.
Faster Violation Detection and the Alert Conundrum
Once you’ve settled on the best technology for you, one of the key advantages is the speed at which it can detect, categorize and validate MAP violations. Automated tools can scan thousands of listings in a fraction of the time it would take to do manually. Once a violation is detected, some providers offer alerts and notifications to brands, enabling them to act promptly.
One note of caution for this approach is that alerts will only help those brands that have both the staff and bandwidth to address each alert in a reasonable timeframe. Without the necessary human power, alerts will pile up and actually add more frustration to your life. If you’ve ever subscribed to a YouTube channel that posts frequent content, you’re aware of how unrealistic alerts can be over time.
Several years ago, a retail customer asked for real-time alerts and was adamant that she could stay on top of her noncompliance. In less than 24 hours, she reached out frantically asking us to turn alerts off. She stated that her inbox was overrun with them and that there wasn’t much difference between each alert. She admitted that she had overestimated the value of real-time notifications and was happier to address them in a single dedicated work session rather than react to each as they came in. If you’ve got the power to address alerts in real-time, they can be great. If not, we would almost always advise against them.
Consistent Enforcement Across Channels
If you’ve read our other posts, you know how we feel about a consistent, judicious MAP enforcement strategy. Consistency is key to getting the most out of your MAP enforcement. By using sophisticated technology, brands can ensure that their MAP policies are applied fairly and evenly across all sales channels. Automated systems offer an unbiased approach to monitoring listings and will treat each violation equally, preventing selective enforcement all while ensuring that yourl retailers are held accountable.
When retailers recognize that your team is employing consistency in your enforcement, it helps to forge stronger relationships with compliant retailers and avoids accusations of favoritism.
Data-Driven Insights for Proactive Management
Beyond detecting violations, intelligent MAP solutions also provide valuable trends and insights. Brands can recognize spikes by channel and retailer, identify repeat offenders, pinpoint seasonal shifts and monitor overall pricing fluctuations across valuable sales channels. When brands have answers, instead of just data, MAP policies become much stronger and brands get the most out of their efforts. Pervasive Mind’s AI-driven insights give brands the power to stay ahead of violations and anticipate pricing challenges before they become widespread.
Choosing the Right MAP Compliance Technology
So, by now you’ve no doubt started to think about which type of solution is right for you. As we stated earlier, not all MAP solutions are created equal, so choosing the right technology is critical to ensuring your brand’s long-term success. We’ll get into what “long-term” really means in another post, but here are a few core features to look for when evaluating MAP compliance solutions:
1. Comprehensive Monitoring/Blocking Handling
Whatever platform you choose should be able to monitor all major e-commerce platforms, third-party marketplaces, and smaller niche websites where your products are sold. Ask about block rate, how blocking is handled and what sort of SLA’s the provider can provide around blocking notifications. By addressing this early, you ensure that you and your provider are realistic and transparent about the inevitability of being blocked by retailer sites. In the case of Pervasive Mind, our AI-powered extraction platform is constantly learning, testing and self-optimizing to avoid blocking. This means our customers enjoy more reliable up-times and consistently reliable data.
2. Customizable Alerts
Your team needs to define if alerts are critical to your success. The vast majority of brands are not able to leverage alerts effectively and end up turning them off. You should decide if the ability to customize alerts and notifications is essential for managing your MAP compliance efficiently. If it is, look for providers that allow you to set specific thresholds for violations and tailor alerts based on your preferences. These may cost more, but if you’re able to act on them quickly enough, it could be worth the investment.
3. Reporting and Analytics
Don’t settle for out of the box reporting. Strong MAP solutions should offer robust, customizable reporting that provides insights into pricing swings, violation frequency, retailer status (authorized/unauthorized), behavioral trends, seasonal identification and more. When set up effectively, the proper analytics will help you identify patterns and improve enforcement strategies sooner than later. A best practice as you consider reporting would be to work with senior leaders to identify which insights, views, KPIs and datasets they would like to see over time, and then confirm with your provider that the reporting meets your team’s requirements. There is nothing worse than buying a solution and learning the reporting doesn’t meet your boss’ needs.
4. Ease of Integration and Ease of Doing Business
If the solution you purchase isn’t easy to set up, and the provider makes you jump through hoops to do business with them, you should question if that’s the best provider for you. Ensuring the technology integrates seamlessly with your existing systems and workflows is crucial to your long-term success, but equally as important is the ability to trust and rely on the team you’re paying to support you. The goal of any solution (MAP or otherwise) is to simplify your business processes, not complicate them with confusing reporting, constantly filing support tickets and having to do additional manual work because your provider isn’t responsive.
Conclusion
With technology being so readily available, relatively inexpensive and far more sophisticated than it was just a few years ago, having a technology to simplify your business is no longer a luxury, especially for managing MAP compliance – it’s a necessity. By leveraging best-in-class automated tools, brands can gain better visibility, detect violations faster, and ensure consistent enforcement across all sales channels…not to mention be happier and less stressed at the end of each business day. Select the right technology and see the difference between watching your brand’s value erode and maintaining pricing control to secure your market position.
