#1 Find Out Unauthorized Sellers of Your Products.

As mentioned above, unauthorized sellers are bad for your brand. The issue has grown with the increasing dependency of shoppers on eCommerce. Unauthorized sellers can do harm in two ways:

• Sell cheap products (replica of your products) under your brand name
• Sell your products below MAP price

So, you must identify unlicensed or unauthorized vendors, and that’s what MAP technology helps achieve. 

Using Brand Alignment MAP Monitoring software, you can identify pricing policy violations by both authorized and unauthorized sellers on your product’s listings. You get a clear picture of your marketplace with daily inventory on authorized and unauthorized sellers.

#2 Reduces Bad Customer Experiences

Price is the biggest factor in purchase decision-making. Shoppers want the best deals, and they believe that wherever they buy your product, they’ll have the same experience. 

But that’s not true when you overlook the violation of your MAP policy. Unauthorized sellers don’t care about margins or relationships. They offer the lowest prices or even fake products with your brand name. This results in a bad customer experience and a negative perception of your brand. 

MAP Monitoring helps take full control of pricing so that sellers focus on offering competitive services and benefits. Put simply, MAP monitoring software helps avoid bad customer experiences. 

#3 Competitive Intelligence

With MAP monitoring, you can track your competitors’ prices and recreate your pricing strategy accordingly. Using these insights, you can even report MAP policy violations to respective manufacturers and request them to take appropriate action. As a result, you develop strong relationships with manufacturers and benefit from flexible pricing. 

Even if an authorized seller fails to comply with your MAP policy, the manufacturer can stop working with them. This also results in helping retailers that follow your pricing policy, enjoy more price flexibility and increase their margins.

Brand Alignment's 24/7 MAP monitoring software facilitates constant price intelligence across 200+ online marketplaces. So, you can always track your competitors' prices and keep your pricing strategy up-to-date.

#4 Control Discounts and Prevent Price Wars

When one retailer offers a discount on a specific product, other competing retailers may also try to follow the same strategy. Retailers think that by offering discounts, they will win customers. But customers are intelligent enough to establish an association between price and quality. So, if the price goes too low, they will opt out of shopping because they’re concerned about the quality. 

It results in price wars that have no lasting benefits. Sales and conversions may increase temporarily, but constant price-cutting decreases your brand value and sales negatively in the long term. Price wars affect manufacturers too. Customers often perceive products that are unreasonably priced low as inferior quality. 

MAP monitoring software can help prevent price wars among retailers. You can track prices in the market for similar products. Accordingly, as mentioned above, you can establish the cheapest cost (MAP) at which your product should be sold.  Everyone, from distributors, retailers, and sellers, should adhere to the guidelines in your MAP policy. This safeguards your business, sellers, and everyone in between.

#5 Protects Your Profit Margins

It becomes easy to sustain a positive profit margin for products with more value. This results in increased sales by retailers who, in turn, buy more products from manufacturers. In the end, the manufacturer brand reflects upon itself as a reseller. So, it’s clear why you need to protect manufacturer pricing; it’s a win-win for all parties involved. 

You can achieve this by mitigating price wars by enforcing your price policy and using MAP monitoring.  So, you get better control over your products' pricing across different marketplaces.

#6 Helpful in Relationship Management

Manufacturers prefer working with retailers that resonate well with their products and brand image. Such retailers can help the manufacturer’s brand establish itself optimally in the market. 

Complying with their MAP policy helps develop and maintain healthy relationships and result in better profit margins over time. Although retailers can break the agreement whenever they want, they risk terminating their relationship with the manufacturer if they do.

By using MAP software for your online sales, you can track both authorized and unauthorized sellers. Accordingly, you can stop working with unauthorized sellers and reward well-performing retailers.