Does a MAP policy cost you sales?

It can, and where it does is predictable. A MAP floor takes price off the table as the thing your resellers compete on. If a reseller’s only reason to carry your product was undercutting the others, that reseller will carry less of it. If price was the only reason customers chose you, you will see it in volume.

Everywhere else, the floor is what funds the reason to stock you at all.

What the floor pays for

A dealer holds stock, photographs it properly, answers fitment questions and handles the returns. Those are costs a drop shipper working from a catalogue feed does not carry. Both of them appear on the same comparison page. If the advertised price is allowed to fall to the drop shipper’s number, the dealer has two options. Match it and drop the service, or drop the line.

So the advertised floor is a way of paying for work you cannot do yourself, in margin instead of cash.

Where it genuinely costs you

Clearance and end of line stock. With no exclusion written into the policy, your dealers sit on stock they cannot advertise at a price that moves it. Write the exclusion, say how long it runs, and say how a dealer learns that it applies.

New dealers trying to win their first customers. They will ask for room. Decide in advance whether the answer is a promotional allowance, a different SKU, or no.

A marketplace selling as the retailer of record. When the marketplace owns the stock it sets its own retail price, and a violation notice has nobody to go to. That is a sourcing question and it should be reported as one instead of sitting in your programme as a violation nobody could resolve.

The two numbers to watch together

Compliance rate and the size of your dealer network. A compliance rate climbing while dealer count falls means the policy is being enforced and the channel is shrinking. You want to find that out early, not at renewal. A flat compliance rate while hundreds of notices go out means the notices are not reaching anyone who can act on them.

Neither number tells you much without a starting point, so measure before the first notice goes out.