What MAP Pricing Protects, in Plain Terms

MAP pricing exists to hold the advertised margin your resellers plan around. A dealer who carries stock prices against the cheapest visible listing. When that listing drops, the dealer follows it down or comes to you for a lower wholesale price.

The margin mechanism

Set a MAP at $39.99 and every compliant seller advertises at $39.99 or above. The seller who holds inventory, answers the phone and handles returns competes on those things.

Take the floor away and the advertised price finds the seller with the lowest cost base. That is often the one holding no inventory at all. Your stocking dealers lose the comparison they were counting on, and the next conversation you have with them is about wholesale price.

What it costs to run

Someone has to identify sellers, send notices, track responses and get a Do Not Sell list into your distributors’ hands. Detection software does the first step. The rest is people, and that is the honest reason brands hand it to a provider.

Questions to ask a MAP provider

• Do you monitor my whole SKU list every cycle, or a sample? If a sample, what is the rotation?
• Do you match on distributor and wholesale part numbers, or only on mine?
• Do you record compliant listings, so I get a compliance rate?
• Do you check at varied times, including weekends?
• Do you identify the legal entity behind a storefront, or report the storefront name?
• Do you send the notices, or hand me a spreadsheet?
• What happens with a seller you cannot identify?
• Do you capture screenshots with timestamps, and how long are they kept?

Answers that should worry you

A compliance figure quoted before your catalogue has been monitored. That number came from somewhere else.

A guarantee that violations will stop. Whether a violation can be ended depends on whether the seller can be reached or cut off. Neither is knowable in advance.

A pitch built on platform complaints. Price alone is not intellectual property infringement, and a complaint framed as one works once.

What to hold a provider to

One number, reported against a baseline they took before enforcing anything. Compliance rate across every listing found, with the sellers they could not identify listed separately, so you can see what the programme has not reached.

That is how our own MAP monitoring and enforcement reports, for automotive and powersports brands.