Persisting MAP Violations: Enforcing the Second Time

Before you escalate a violation, work out which kind it is. A broken data feed and a seller testing you look identical on the listing page. Send the same letter to both and you waste the letter on one, and your credibility on the other.

Four questions do the sorting. This is about answering them, and about the harder job of getting compliance back after a programme has already lapsed once.

The four questions

Is this seller new to your catalogue? A storefront appearing for the first time has received nothing from you. Send the policy, not a warning.

Is the whole listing wrong, or only this part? If a dealer’s entire catalogue dropped by the same proportion, a pricing rule misfired somewhere. One part below policy while the rest holds is a decision.

Which price file were they using? If their figure matches an older version of yours, or a distributor’s copy, the violation started upstream. The fix is to the file, and not to the seller.

Has this storefront been here before? Repeat contact from the same entity, on the same parts, after a notice they answered. That is the pattern qualifying them for the supply tier. One incident is not.

Three records make those answers possible

A timestamped capture with the URL, kept, because sellers correct the price and then say it was never there.

Your own published price file, with a version date on it. These disputes turn on what the number was, and the dealer will tell you it came straight from their supplier.

A record of what the seller was sent and when. Enforcement that cannot be traced to a policy the seller actually received is the kind that gets argued with.

Without those, every violation looks the same, and the programme defaults to sending everyone the same notice.

Why the second push is harder

A programme that ran hard and then went quiet has taught your sellers something. The ones who waited it out were right to wait. The ones who complied lost margin for a quarter. The discounted price has sat on comparison pages long enough to become what shoppers expect your part to cost.

So a restart is not a resumption. The compliant dealers need to hear that the pause was yours and is over. The sellers who exploited it need the sequence run from the beginning, because a letter about a violation from eight months ago goes nowhere.

What a restart has to include

Measure the compliance rate before sending anything, so you know what you are restarting from and can show what changed later.

Reissue the policy with a current date, and record delivery. Whatever you sent two years ago is not a document you want to rely on.

Fix the files first. The distributor circulating an out-of-date MAP figure generates violations faster than you can notice them. Every one of those is an argument you lose.

Then start at the first tier for everyone and run the sequence properly, through repeat contact to the supply route. The one thing that ends a habitual violator is resupply stopping. Everything before it just moves the discount somewhere you are not looking.

The four causes behind recurring violations are covered separately, and the service page covers how the sequence runs.