MAP monitoring is one of the essential tools for today’s E-commerce activities. By scraping data online, companies can keep an eye on all sorts of information about their product for different tasks. In this article, we will see what benefits businesses can expect from using MAP monitoring.
What is Minimum Advertised Price?
Minimum Advertised Price or MAP can be described as the rule that defines the bottom price that can be placed on a product. That rule applies to the retailers by product manufacturers. If a retailer tries to sell a product at a price of $99 and MAP will be set at $100, then the retailer will violate this policy.
MAP is called to solve several problems for manufacturing companies. The first thing that can be controlled through MAP is pricing itself. In the competitive sales field, third-party vendors tend to resort to price dumping. MAP sets the lowest price that product can possibly be sold for, in order to equalize prices among different suppliers or stores.
This can also be a tool for maintaining brand image and value. If third-party vendors start dropping prices, it can affect overall brand perception. Retailer’s main target is to get a short-term profit that can damage the brand in the long perspective.
Some brands may also face a problem of a knock-off market. Vendors can start to make their own look alike products and try to sell them as the original product. MAP can help control and look over the vendors in this space. In some cases, with lack of control, shoppers can start to identify the knock-offs with the real product. That leads to QA problems and misperception of a brand’s qualities.
All of these problems can be overcome with the use of the MAP monitoring process. Overall, monitoring involves using web scraping and proxy tools. One of the complexities with the MAP monitoring system lies in its regularity, which raises the demand for quality and scalability of web scraping service. This also makes a high requirement for proxy quality. Depending on the case, MAP monitoring may require use of a datacenter or datacenter rotating proxy, for more reliable and fast scraping over the time.
Why Do You Need MAP Monitoring?
With the vast majority of shopping going online, Ecommerce solutions became the essential tool for many companies. MAPs highly relies on data mapping, scraping and use of residential or datacenter proxies. Even with simple MAP monitoring, retailers will feel more aware of breaking these policies. MAP may affect not only prices, but brand image and competition across all markets.
In the first place, Ecommerce MAP monitoring solutions can be helpful in price data collection. Such data later fed to the internal algorithms can automatically alert the legal teams for further actions. This procedure needs to be repeated in some time intervals to make sure that retailers make changes. It is also possible to find and block from product retailers that tend to break MAP agreements.
MAP monitoring can be helpful in marketing purposes and for adtech businesses. By scraping that kind of data, marketing departments can make sure that prices for vendors match with advertising. Overall, this tool is helpful for checking visuals and advertisement massages. It can be especially useful with the residential static proxy setup for better geo-targeting and checking how ads look from different parts of the world.
Web scraping tools can find their purpose in MAP monitoring for QA departments. This way, companies can find and block vendors who sell knockoffs of their product. More than this, MAP monitoring can help with tracking the mistakes in product description or choice of photo.
Overall, use of MAP monitoring protects brand and company from many types of possible harm. Data collection can easily help monitor customer reviews, scanning search engines for brand mentions and watching over the product.
Why Violate MAP Agreements?
Market dictates its rules and retailers always try to balance between violating MAP and gaining more profits. E-commerce space becomes more and more competitive by day, and this pressure sometimes pushes vendors to lower the prices even lower than MAP to fulfill the market needs.
Plus, unauthorized vendors can also cut into the chain of sales and lower prices even more, gaining the pressure on other members of the market. Price fluctuations over retailers may affect the brand image and raise questions for consumers. Overall, maintaining MAP policies is a less resourceful task, then rebuilding trust to the brand over and over.
MAP violations will likely have a negative effect on a company partner’s network. Brands usually put a lot of effort into building sustainable channels for distribution. Unauthorized vendors can highly damage a trust in a brand and cause troubles for all distribution chains.
How Does MAP Monitoring Work?
To better understand what is MAP monitoring and how it works, we need to remember that basic MAP policies won’t make an effect without constant tracking of their application. MAP monitoring definition lies in the process of auto or manual collection of prices and other data about products through different vendors.
MAP monitoring is usually made automatically, but can be done manually. By using manual option, MAP monitoring will include searches of retailers and collecting their prices for products. Then, if a violation is found, contacting the vendor and checking MAP policies with him. That can be a way if your company has a limited list of vendors to check and keep an eye on.
However, monitoring even a dozen retailers can become a tricky task that cuts a lot of time. To make this process automatic, E-commerce companies tend to use special software and web scraping tools to make MAP monitoring maintenance. Solutions like these can collect all needed data and deliver it in a short time. For example, with the right web scraper and datacenter proxy, companies can get a list of all sellers that offer their products.
Collecting these data also allows us to flag and report MAP agreement violations in a short time. With those tools, companies can control a lot of distributing chains simultaneously. With the setup of residential proxy, it is also possible to target different markets depending on their geolocation.
Automatization of MAP monitoring is an important sphere for business to grow in. It can help to build a more stable and sustainable distribution and marketing work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Please read our Documentation if you have questions that are not listed below.
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What is MAP (Minimum Advertised Price)?
MAP stands for Minimum Advertised Price. This policy targets retailers by product manufacturers to prevent price dropping. With the help of MAP manufacturing companies can control pricing for their products across all vendors.
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What data involves MAP monitoring?
First of all, MAP monitoring collects information about prices, quantity of product and their descriptions from different vendors. All this data can be collected only if it's publicly available.
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What type of proxies are suited for MAP more?
MAP monitoring can involve different types of proxies for solving different tasks in data scraping. In most cases, residential proxies will be a good choice, due to their geo-targeting options. With this type of proxies, MAP monitoring can be directed to specific locations to collect data across one country, or even a city.
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Why violate the MAP policies?
Third-party vendors and other retailers can neglect MAP policies to gain their profits. But the company owner of the product, in its turn, can track that violation and terminate the relationship with the supplier.
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How proxies can help you with MAP?
MAP monitoring relies on collecting data by web scraping and proxy tools. Proxy in this case serves as the main access point for data scraping across all chains of retailers. Almost any web scraping task highly depends on use of proxies as the main routes for data collection.
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