How personalised pricing changes MAP monitoring

Personalised pricing breaks MAP monitoring in one specific place. The price a shopper sees is no longer the price printed on the public page. It arrives after a login, inside a ZIP code, or inside a segment you cannot see from outside. If your policy defines the advertised price as the one shown publicly, every one of those prices falls outside the definition. A notice built on one is easy to argue with.

That makes this a drafting problem before it is a monitoring problem.

The prices one retailer can show for one SKU

• the listed price a logged out visitor sees
• a lower price that appears once the shopper signs in to an account
• a price tied to a location, set by ZIP code or by store selection
• a price shown to a segment, such as a loyalty tier or a first time buyer
• a price that only exists in the cart, once a coupon applies

Your policy was probably written when there was one.

Four questions to put to whoever drafted your policy

Does a price shown to a shopper after login count as advertised under our policy, or does it sit outside it?

Is a price offered to one ZIP code, or to one loyalty tier, below MAP a violation, or is it a permitted individual offer?

Does our definition of “advertised” still describe the way our resellers display prices?

Which of these prices can we actually see, and what would it take to see the rest?

The last one decides what enforcement is even available to you. A price behind a login cannot be read from a crawl of the public page. Reading it means holding an account on that retailer’s site. A location dependent price means checking from more than one location. A cart price means going as far as the cart on every listing you check.

Where to draw the line in the document

The workable version names surfaces instead of describing them in the abstract. Say whether the policy covers the logged out listing, the account price, the app, email and push. Say whether it covers the cart, and the price displayed after a ZIP code is entered. Say whether a price shown to a subset of shoppers counts. Say what happens when a discount is applied at checkout and the advertised figure never moves.

Resellers read the policy literally when a notice arrives. Anything it does not name is the thing they will point at.

We are not lawyers, and the wording is your counsel’s call. What we can tell you is which of those prices we can actually see on your catalogue. That decides whether the wording is enforceable in practice. That is the work behind our MAP monitoring and enforcement service.