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MAP Monitoring and Enforcement for Automotive and Powersports Brands

Updated

Monitoring finds offers to review. We investigate the seller and policy record, then send approved notices and record what changes. Some cases need a supply investigation and legal review of the available restrictions. Others remain unresolved. The report distinguishes completed actions from observed results.

That chain is what this MAP monitoring service runs for automotive and powersports brands. Catalogue coverage, seller identification, the enforcement sequence, and evidence that survives a seller saying the price was never there. It is not part of the agency’s growth or build work. It is sold, run and measured separately from all of that. It is also not competitive price intelligence, not a repricing product, and not legal advice. We do not decide what your MAP figure should be and we do not draft your policy.

Detection is the easy half

Programmes do not fail at the detection step. They fail after the violation is seen. A weekly export lands in an inbox. Nobody has time to work out who “PowerDeals Direct” is. The same seller is still under policy a quarter later. The detection was never the bottleneck. The identification, the notices, the escalation and the supply cut-off were.

So the work is organised around what happens after a violation is found.

What actually gets monitored

MAP applies to the advertised price, which is not always the listed number. Monitoring has to read the figure a shopper ends up seeing. The listing price, a stacked coupon, a bundle that hides the discount. And the add-to-cart gate that exists so the advertised price is never displayed at all.

Three things decide whether coverage is real.

Your whole SKU list, not a sample. Sampling is how violators survive. A seller who discounts only the parts nobody audits is invisible to a rotating sample, and the compliance number you get back measures the sample. It does not measure your catalogue.

Varied check times. Price changes are scheduled. A seller who drops below policy on Friday evening and comes back on Monday morning is compliant in every weekday-business-hours crawl ever run. Checks move around, including weekends and holidays.

Cross-referenced part numbers. Violators routinely list under a distributor’s part number, a wholesale number, or one they invented. Matching on your part number alone systematically under-reports, and an under-reporting match is exactly what makes a compliance report look tidy.

We also record listings that are at or above policy. Compliance rate is the number that tells you whether the programme is working. A count of violations found tells you how hard someone looked.

Finding the seller behind the listing

A storefront name is not an identity, and the same operator often runs several. The research is unglamorous. Business registration lookups, site and contact footprints, shared phone numbers and return addresses. Then cross-referencing every storefront found in your programme against the others. Five listings collapse into one company to write to. Where you run more than one brand or product line with us, that cross-reference runs across them. A seller willing to undercut policy is rarely doing it on your parts alone.

A test purchase may provide a packing slip, return address or serial number for a supply investigation. We compare those clues with shipment records. If they do not establish the distributor, we report that limit. Any proposed supply restriction needs legal review and a check of its observed result.

What enforcement means here

It is tiered, because a first notice settles some violations outright and the rest need the later ones.

  1. Notice. Email from templates you have approved, in language taken from your own policy. No generic threat text.
  2. Repeat contact. Phone and a mailed letter where email is ignored. Some sellers respond only to paper.
  3. Supply. A Do Not Sell list your distributors can act on. Counsel reviews the proposed restrictions. We report what changed and which cases remain unresolved.
  4. Platform. Where a listing genuinely infringes intellectual property, the platform’s own process applies. Price alone is not infringement.

The other half is the sellers who comply. They get acknowledged, and you get a current list of who they are with contact details. Your compliant dealer network is an asset. A programme that treats every seller as an adversary loses the good ones to a competitor who does not.

Evidence is captured at the moment of the violation, with the URL and timestamp, and kept. Sellers change price after a notice and then deny the price existed. With a capture, that conversation ends in one reply.

Where we stop, and why

A price below MAP does not by itself establish intellectual property infringement. Use a platform complaint only when evidence supports the alleged infringement. Ask counsel to review the claim before submitting it.

The legal starting points in the FAQ are Colgate and Leegin. The FTC’s guidance explains the federal framework and differences under some state laws. Your counsel decides how those rules apply to your policy.

What you get

  • Daily monitoring of your full SKU list across the marketplaces and dealer sites where your parts are actually advertised
  • A cross-referenced part number list built from your catalogue and from distributor numbering, so a listing that never uses your part number is still matched
  • Timestamped screenshot evidence for every violation, kept and retrievable when a seller says the price was never there
  • Seller identification down to the legal entity behind the storefront, with registration and contact details wherever they can be established
  • The enforcement sequence run for you, from first notice through mailed letters, using templates you approve and wording that matches your policy
  • A Do Not Sell list you can hand to your distributors, kept current as sellers are identified and resolved
  • A daily report with a compliance rate measured against every listing found, including the ones that turn out to be compliant
  • A list of your fully compliant sellers with contact details, so your dealer communications can use it

How it runs

  1. Map the catalogue and the policy

    We take your full SKU list, build the part number cross-reference, and read your written policy line by line. Enforcement that cannot be traced back to a policy the seller was actually given is the kind that gets argued with. So we establish that first.

  2. Monitor before enforcing anything

    We run monitoring and measure the compliance rate before a single notice goes out. Without a starting rate there is no way to tell a working programme from a quiet quarter. Every later claim about progress becomes an opinion.

  3. Identify the seller, not the listing

    A storefront name is not an identity. We use business registration lookups and site and contact footprints. Every storefront found in your programme is cross-referenced against the others. Where the supply route matters, a test purchase is read for its return address and serialisation.

  4. Escalate in tiers

    The escalation exists for the violations a first notice does not settle, through repeat contact, a mailed letter, then the supply route. We record the result of each step. A supply restriction is an option for counsel to review, not a guaranteed end to violations.

  5. Report compliance, not activity

    You get the compliance rate and what changed, including the sellers we could not identify and the ones that ignored us. A report full of violations found tells you how hard we looked, not whether your policy is holding.

Questions we get asked

Is enforcing a MAP policy legal?
We are not your lawyers and nothing here is legal advice. Two things are worth knowing before you ask counsel. A MAP policy governs the advertised price, never the price a reseller may actually sell at. That is what keeps it distinct from resale price maintenance. The second concerns the United States. A manufacturer's unilateral decision about whom it keeps supplying is treated differently from an agreement on price. That has held since United States v. Colgate and Co., 250 U.S. 300 (1919). Resale price maintenance itself has been judged under the rule of reason since Leegin Creative Leather Products v. PSKS, 551 U.S. 877 (2007). Several states are stricter than federal law. Your counsel writes the policy. We enforce it as written.
Why only automotive and powersports?
Because the hard part is identification, and identification is industry-specific. Part numbering conventions, distributor structure, the way a single operator fronts several storefronts, the wholesale numbers a listing hides behind. In a category we do not know, you would be paying for us to learn it on your catalogue.
Can you guarantee the violations go away?
No. Whether a violation can be ended at all depends on whether the seller can be reached or cut off. Neither is knowable before your catalogue has been monitored. Some sellers are unreachable, offshore, or not buying through your network at all. We contact identifiable sellers and investigate supply routes where evidence allows. We report what changed and which cases remain unresolved.
We already pay for a monitoring tool. What does this add?
A tool finds listings. The expensive work starts after detection. Working out who the seller legally is, sending notices that match your policy, escalating the ones that ignore them. Then getting the Do Not Sell list into your distributors' hands. If your team is already doing that, a tool may be all you need and we will say so.
What about the marketplace itself pricing below MAP?
Check the seller shown on the offer. When the marketplace is the retailer, there is no third-party seller to contact about that listing. We document the offer and ask your commercial and legal teams to review the supply arrangement.
Is this the same team as the rest of Synapse?
Same firm and the same people, but a distinct service. It is sold on its own, run on its own schedule, and reported against its own number, which is violations resolved. Traffic and leads belong to the other half of the firm. You can buy this without buying anything else, and nobody here will try to sell you a website on the back of it.

MAP guides

We have written 79 guides on minimum advertised price. They are grouped here by the question each one answers.

Monitoring prices

Violations and enforcement

For retailers and resellers

What MAP is and what it protects

Writing and rolling out a policy

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