// MAP monitoring
Decoding MAP Violations: Understanding the Root Causes and Solutions
A pricing programme goes live, compliance improves, and within weeks the violations are back. Four things cause that, and only one of them is cheating. Treating all four as cheating is why the second round of enforcement is harder than the first.
Honest feed errors
A dealer takes price files from several wholesale distributors and from you. Those get pushed to a website and two or three marketplaces, each with its own feed format. Somewhere in that chain a cost field gets read as a sale price. The listing goes out below policy, at a loss to the dealer.
A fast alert fixes this one. A warning letter does not, and it spends a dealer relationship on an error the dealer wanted to know about.
Stale price files from a distributor
The dealer says the violation is not valid because the file came straight from its distributor. Sometimes that is true.
The way out is to hold the manufacturer’s price file directly and compare. That shows which distributor is shipping old or wrong data, which is the thing that needs fixing. Chasing the dealer leaves the source in place and the same violation comes back next month from a different dealer.
Sellers who have never seen the policy
New sellers appear constantly. A seller who never received the policy is not refusing it.
A report of newly seen sellers, delivered as they appear, turns this into an onboarding job. Onboarding is cheaper than enforcement and it does not start the relationship with a threat.
Sellers testing whether anyone is still watching
The fourth one is deliberate. A seller that knows the policy drops a few parts below it to find out whether monitoring is still running. The incentive is real. If enforcement has gone quiet, a small discount on a competitive part is worth money.
Programmes invite this by starting hard and easing off. When caught, the explanation is usually a system glitch.
The answer is dull. Run enforcement at the same intensity in month eighteen as in month one, and the test stops being worth taking. There is no version of this that finishes. Violations come back the week the monitoring stops, which is the argument for treating it as a standing cost and not a project.