MAP Pricing: What to Run In House and What to Outsource

A MAP programme splits cleanly into two jobs. Finding listings under policy, which software does well, and doing something about them, which is research, correspondence and a supply decision. Buying the first and assuming it covers the second is how a brand ends up paying a subscription for a weekly report nobody actions.

The half that software does

Crawling marketplaces and dealer sites, matching listings to your catalogue, capturing prices with timestamps, and alerting when a figure drops below your file. This is a real product and it is worth paying for. The output is a list.

The half that people do

Working out which legal entity is behind a storefront. Writing a notice in the language of your own policy. Answering the dealer who says the marketplace applied the discount. Deciding whether the seller has a pattern. Getting a Do Not Sell list into distributors’ hands and checking they acted on it.

None of that is automatable today, and a vendor implying otherwise is describing the list again in different words.

Questions that separate the two

Ask a prospective vendor these, and hold out for a specific answer. Capability language means no.

• How do you match a listing that never uses my part number? Distributor numbering, wholesale numbers and invented SKUs are normal in automotive and powersports, and matching on your own number alone under-reports.
• Do you cover my whole MAP list or a sample of it? If a sample, what does the compliance figure you report actually describe?
• When do you check? Prices move on evenings, weekends and holidays, and a weekday business-hours crawl misses a seller who drops on Friday and returns on Monday.
• What evidence do you keep, and for how long? A URL and a timestamp per violation, retrievable months later, is what ends the argument when a seller says the price was never there.
• Who identifies the seller behind the storefront, and how? Ask what they do when the storefront name matches nothing.
• Who sends the notices, you or us? And who answers the replies?
• What happens at the tier after email? If there is no answer, the programme ends at email.

What to keep in house whatever you buy

The price file. Publish your own figures with a date on them, because a violation is often a disagreement about what the number is.

The supply decision. No vendor can stop shipping to a dealer. Someone inside your company has to be willing to. If nobody is, the last tier of your escalation does not exist, and the programme stalls at repeat notices.

The relationship. Your dealers should hear about the policy from you before they hear about a violation from anyone else.

The legal line, drawn before you shop

MAP governs the advertised price. It does not govern what the reseller charges, and a vendor who offers to control the selling price for you is selling something else. We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. The distinction between a unilateral supply decision and an agreement on price dates from United States v. Colgate and Co., 250 U.S. 300 (1919). Resale price maintenance 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. Have counsel write the policy before you evaluate anybody to enforce it.

The honest answer for some brands

If your team already identifies sellers, sends notices and controls supply, a monitoring tool may be the only thing you need to buy. There is a case for handing the whole programme over. The work after detection is slow and unglamorous, and the first thing to get dropped when a quarter gets busy. What we run is described on the MAP monitoring and enforcement page.