Persisting MAP Violations: The Reasons Behind Them

You enforce a pricing programme, compliance comes up, and within weeks the violations are back. Four things cause that, and only the last of them is a seller trying it on. Telling them apart is what stops you spending enforcement effort on a data problem.

The pricing plumbing broke

A dealer takes feeds from several distributors and from you, in different formats, and pushes the result to a website and three marketplaces. Every one of those steps can produce a price nobody intended.

The classic version. A blanket instruction to list everything at a ten percent discount comes back as everything listed at ten percent of cost. The discount was applied to the wrong column. The dealer is losing money on every sale and does not know yet. A violation notice that arrives the same morning is worth more to them than it is to you.

This group is the reason a first notice should be an email. It should carry the listing, the capture and the correct MAP figure, and nothing threatening. Threat text spent on a broken feed buys you an argument with someone who would have fixed it in ten minutes.

The price file is wrong before it reaches them

Distributors circulate their own copies of your price file, and the copies disagree. Two wholesalers can be shipping the same part with different MAP figures attached, through a stale export or through an edit somebody made deliberately.

The dealer then says the price came directly from their supplier and your monitoring must be broken. If you hold the file you published, that conversation ends quickly, and it points at which distributor is circulating the wrong numbers. Fixing that one source removes every violation downstream of it, which no amount of notice-sending would have done.

Sellers who have never seen the policy

New storefronts appear against your catalogue continuously, and a seller who bought stock from a distributor last week has received nothing from you. They are not violating a policy. They are pricing a part.

So a weekly list of sellers appearing for the first time is worth more than another sweep of the ones you know. New sellers get the policy and a plain explanation of what the advertised price covers. The ones who then keep discounting have moved into a different category, and you have the record showing when they were told.

Sellers checking whether you stopped

The fourth group is the one that knows. A seller drops a few cents below policy on a slow weekend to see whether a notice arrives. If it does not, the discount deepens and spreads across your catalogue. A few cents is enough to sit at the top of a price-sorted results page.

This is the group that makes enforcement cadence a real number instead of a preference. A programme that enforces hard for a quarter and then goes quiet gets tested. The test is designed to be cheap for them and invisible to you. When the notice does land, the answer is usually that it was a system glitch. Send it anyway, keep the capture, and let the pattern build. Repeat contact from the same storefront is what qualifies a seller for the supply tier.

What that adds up to

Three of the four causes are not defiance, and ordinary work fixes all three. The work is correct files, early notices, and a way of catching new sellers before they get settled. The fourth is fixed by not stopping.

That is why monitoring is continuous. Violations do not get solved once. How we run it.