Who doesn’t enjoy a good domino setup? Somebody kicks it off, and we are treated to wonderful patterns, images are unveiled, and neat transitions bridge one effect to another. You know what’s not enjoyable? Setting up tens of thousands of dominoes and putting in the painstaking work to make sure each tile fits your vision. It’s kind of like when a brand wants to monitor its minimum advertised price (MAP). You put so much effort into justifying the cost of your product only to see it undervalued on the marketplace by a renegade seller setting off a cascade of MAP violations. It’s a domino effect that you don’t have the time to manually monitor, but it sure would go a long way to know who tipped that first domino without any effort on your part.
When you find your business inundated with anonymous sellers violating your minimum advertised price policy, you want to know who the perpetrators are. It would certainly make enforcing your MAP a lot easier. You could see who started the chain of events that led to a price cascade in which your larger sellers violated MAP as well. Whose prices are your sellers matching? If you’re attempting manual monitoring, it’s unlikely that you have the time to try and identify the names and contact information from every unauthorized and anonymous seller. Even if you don’t discover a large quantity of offenders, their violations will continue unchecked while you go through the exhausting exercise of sourcing their seller profile information to send sanctions. You’ll want to identify aliases as well. Who owns whom? Being able to see which sites are owned by another site is critical as you understand your online channel.
How Automated MAP Monitoring With Prowl Helps
The first major benefit you’ll see with Prowl is the ability to identify the many sellers that are violating your MAP policy. It will finally become transparent which are retailers, who owns whom, and who started the problem by violating first. You’ll know where other sellers are getting their lower price inspiration from and who set off the price cascade. The seller database is constantly being updated and enhanced by Prowl users.
Another big advantage, perhaps the most important, is being able to connect the dots between sellers who are hiding behind assumed identities. Prowl research tools help identify third-party sellers. You might find that the same proprietor owns multiple domains, and that its smaller, lesser-known identities are the ones violating your MAP. Meanwhile, its major retail name continues to follow your policy. For example, not only does Wayfair LLC own Wayfair Supply and Wayfair.com, it is also the owner of AllModern.com. If you were unaware of this relationship and considered Wayfair LLC to be one of your trusted retailers, in the event that AllModern.com violated your MAP policy, without Prowl you might never uncover the fact that Wayfair LLC, as a parent company, isn’t actually honoring your policy.
Prowl helps connect the dots so that you have the full picture to take action. Now you’ll see that seller you thought you could trust but is in fact not trustworthy at all and is taking advantage of you and your brand. Remove them from your list of authorized retailers to avoid any future problems.
Schedule a demo to discover how we can help you identify anonymous sellers, assert your MAP enforcement, and stop that first domino from falling.
