MAP Policy 101: Balancing Profitability and Pricing Guidelines

A MAP programme costs money to run and produces one number worth reporting. That number is the share of the listings you found that sit at or above policy. It has to be recorded before the first notice goes out.

Skip the starting figure and the programme gets judged on anecdote for the rest of its life. Somebody will remember a bad listing they saw, and nobody will be able to say whether things got better.

What the floor is protecting

MSRP is a suggestion about retail price. MAP is a floor on what may be advertised. The margin it protects belongs to the seller, which is the point.

A dealer stocks your parts, pays for the space, and employs someone who knows which part a customer needs. They cannot survive being undercut on the advertised number by a seller doing none of that. The floor is what keeps that dealer buying from you. Your own margin benefits second, through a channel that stays willing to carry the line.

Count compliant listings, not violations found

A violation count measures how hard someone looked. Double the crawl and the number doubles while nothing in the market changed.

A compliance rate divides by every listing found, including the ones that turn out to be fine, so it moves only when behaviour moves. Report it per part number family and for the catalogue together. One problem SKU can drag a healthy programme down, and a healthy average can hide one.

The rate means nothing without coverage

Three things decide whether a compliance figure describes your catalogue or describes your crawl.

Your whole part number list instead of a sample. A seller who discounts only the parts nobody audits is invisible to a rotating sample, and the figure you get back then measures the sample.

Check times that move, including evenings, weekends and holidays. A seller who drops below the floor on a Friday night and comes back Monday morning is compliant in every weekday crawl ever run.

Part numbers cross-referenced against distributor and wholesale numbering. Violators list under numbers that are not yours, and matching on your number alone under-reports in a way that makes the report look tidy.

What the work actually costs

Monitoring is the cheap part. The cost sits in what happens after a violation is found, and it is worth budgeting honestly before you start.

• Identifying the legal entity behind a storefront, which is research time more than software.
• Sending and tracking notices in the language of your own policy, then handling the replies.
• Phone calls and mailed letters for the sellers who ignore email.
• Test purchases where the supply route is the real question, which cost the part plus the shipping plus the time to read what came back.
• Your own people approving escalations, which is the step that silently stalls programmes.

When the floor is the thing that is wrong

If compliance on a part refuses to improve after the full sequence has actually been run against it, consider that the number may be wrong. A floor nobody will advertise at is a pricing decision dressed as a compliance problem.

Reopen it with market data you gathered independently. Working the level out together with your resellers is the version that creates a legal problem. That is a conversation for your counsel, and not for us.

The monitoring, the compliance rate and the enforcement behind it are what our MAP monitoring and enforcement service is measured on.