Online marketing service provider Where 2 Get It (which focuses on national brands) has added "minimum advertised price" or MAP monitoring to their solutions for manufacturers.
MAP is essentially just a suppliers pricing policy that does not permit its resellers to advertise prices below some specified amount. It can include the resellers' retail price as well.
Selling below MAP can cause many problems for advertisers including the devaluing of the brand, eroding margins, and conflict within the existing established sales channels. Where 2 Get It's MAP Monitor identifies pricing activity associated with advertised products and alerts merchants/sellers of the true market price of merchandise. By monitoring pricing across selected comparison shopping engines including Amazon, Bing, ebay, Google Product Search, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, Smarter.com, Yahoo! Shopping and others) gives these big brands a big advantage.
"Today's consumers are more educated than ever before and with the rise of the Internet sales channels and comparison shopping sites this provides the savvy consumer a huge cost savings," said Manish Patel, founder and CEO of Where 2 Get It. "This creates a problem for manufacturers who need to control and protect the bottom line of their entire sales channel. Therefore a MAP policy should be implemented and monitored."