MAP pricing explained
What minimum advertised price policies are, how violations are detected, and why evidence matters more than detection.
A minimum advertised price policy is a brand's stated floor for how low a reseller may advertise its products. It governs advertising rather than the sale itself, which is the distinction that keeps it workable.
Detection is the easy half and the half most tools sell. The work is evidence: what was advertised, by whom, at what, when, and captured in a form that survives being forwarded to a lawyer. A screenshot with no timestamp and no provenance is not evidence.
The second half is pattern. One violation is an incident; the same seller twelve times across a quarter is a case, and you can only make that argument if your record is append-only and queryable over time.
Enforcement also depends on knowing who is selling. On marketplaces the offer, not the product, is the entity that matters — and an unauthorised seller at full price is often a bigger problem than an authorised one on promotion.
Keep reading
What is commerce intelligence?
Commerce intelligence is the layer above price monitoring: an index of what exists, who sells it, at what, and what that means.
Why percentile beats percent-off
A percentile against a product's own history is a defensible measure of discount depth; percent-off a reference price is not.
Product matching and why it fails quietly
How cross-seller product matching works, the three ways it fails, and why published match confidence matters.
GTIN, UPC, EAN and ASIN
How product identifiers relate, why check digits matter, and what to do when there is no identifier at all.
Data provenance in commerce data
Why every price should carry its origin and a confidence weight, and what goes wrong when it does not.