Reviewing a MAP Policy You Already Have

When a MAP policy stops working, the number is rarely the problem. The definitions are. A document that names a figure and says nothing else leaves a reseller free to stay inside it while showing a shopper something lower. Every one of those routes is legal under your own wording.

Six things to check when you reread it.

Price obfuscation

Call for price. Register to see the price. Price revealed at the last step of checkout. Each of these keeps the advertised figure off the page while the real number moves wherever the seller wants.

None of them breaks a policy that only names a floor. If you want them treated as violations, the document has to define them as violations, in those words.

Discounts applied at checkout

A site-wide code, a clipped coupon, an automatic reduction on the payment page. The listing is compliant and the price a shopper pays is not.

Decide whether your floor applies before or after these, write it down, and expect the answer to be argued at least once. The alternative is a compliance report that looks healthier than the channel is.

Promotional windows

A sales season is when a reseller’s promotional engine applies a blanket percentage across a whole catalogue, yours included. Some of what that produces is a decision by a person. Some of it is a setting nobody thought about, which still puts your part under policy on a page a shopper can see.

Decide in advance. If the floor moves for a season, publish the dates and the new figure before the season, and say when it reverts. If it does not move, say that too, so a reseller cannot claim they assumed otherwise.

Where you can realistically cover

Total coverage of every surface everywhere is not a promise anyone should make to you. What is achievable is full coverage of your own SKU list, on the channels where your parts are actually advertised. The check times move around, so a Friday evening drop does not sit unseen until Monday.

Sampling is the thing to avoid. A seller who discounts only the parts nobody audits is invisible to a rotating sample, and the compliance figure you get back describes the sample.

Prices inside apps

A price shown only inside a retailer’s own app will not appear in a check of their website. Decide whether your policy covers it, and be honest with yourself about whether you have any way to see it. A clause you cannot monitor is a clause a reseller learns to rely on.

Proof that the reseller has it

Version the document, date it, and keep a record of who it was sent to and when. Enforcement that cannot be traced back to a policy the seller was actually given is the kind that gets argued with. Whoever has the distribution record usually wins that argument.

After the review

Republish, record receipt, then remeasure. A revised policy with a new definition of advertised price changes your compliance rate on its own, before anybody sends a notice. Listings that were passing now do not. That is the review working.

How we run monitoring and the enforcement sequence is on the MAP service page.