As the market of e-commerce is ever-growing, we can utilize that online markets are increasing with more branded products getting sold by resellers or retailers worldwide. Some brands might not notice that some resellers and sellers sell branded products with lower pricing to get find customers, result in negative impact on a brand itself.
For a brand reputation maintenance, you can utilize MAP policy like an agreement for retailers or resellers.
MAP – The Concept
Minimum Advertised Pricing (MAP) is a pre-confirmed minimum price for definite products that authorized resellers and retailers confirm not to advertise or sell or below.
If a shoe brand set MAP for A product at $100, then all the approved resellers or retailers, either at online markets or in brick-&-mortar stores become grateful to pricing not under $100. Otherwise, retailers and resellers will get penalized according to the MAP signed agreement.
Normally, any MAP Policy might benefit in provided aspects:
- Guaranteed fair prices and competition in resellers or retailers
- Maintaining value and brand awareness
- Preventing underpricing and pricing war, protecting profit limits
Why is Making the MAP Policy Tough for Brands?
1. Franchise storesA franchise store is among the most common ways to resell products of definite brands. To organize monitoring of MAP Violation of the front store retailers, we could just utilize financial systems to monitor transactions in an efficient way.
Yet, a brand still can’t ensure that all sold products submitted by franchise stores are 100% genuine. It might require additional manual work to make that work perfectly.
2. Online Market ResellersCompared to franchise stores, a situation of online marketplace retailers becomes more complicated.
An online marketplace assembly
If we look at research of the Web Retailers, we can have a basic idea about world’s finest online marketplaces. With over 150 main all- category markets across the globe, countless niche ones are available.
Online retailers which might be selling products in various online marketplacesCertainly, most online retailers might choose multiple marketplaces to sell products which can bring more traffic with benefits.
Indefinite resellers without any approvalDespite those that sell products using approval, some individual resellers deal in copycat products that a brand might not be aware of.
So, monitoring pricing a few some products with ample online markets at similar time could be very difficult for a brand.
How to Find MAP Violations and Defend Your Brand in Online Markets?
For outdated physical retail, a brand require a business system to record data to attain MAP monitoring. With online market resellers, we would like to introduce an extensively used however ignored tech data scraping which can efficiently help them in MAP monitoring.
Consequently, how do brands utilize data scraping for detecting if all resellers violate an MAP policy?
Let’s assume that one online reseller is selling products on different 10 online websites like Amazon, Target, JD, Taobao, eBay, Rakuten, Walmart,Tmall, Flipkart, and Tokopedia.
Step 1: Identify which data you need?
Frankly speaking, for MAP monitoring, all the data needed include product information and pricing.
Step 2: Choose a suitable technique to make data scrapers.
We need to do 10 data scrapers to collect data from corresponding markets and scraping data in a definite frequency.
A programmer need to write 10 scripts to achieve web scraping. Though, the inadequacies are:
- Trouble in maintaining web scrapers if a website layout is changed.
- Difficulty to cope with IP rotations as well as CAPTCHA and RECAPTCHA.
A supernumerary selection is the use of a data scraping tool made by Actowiz Solutions. For coders or non-coders, this can provide ample web scraping.
1. Point to click interface: Actowiz Solutions works with a task template mode, everyone can perform a job in several clicks.
2. Automatic crawler: Also, the latest Actowiz Solutions’ scrapers enable auto data detection and creates a crawler within minutes.
3. Auxiliary working for web scraping: While scraping data, we may encounter with an anti-blocking structure. With most cases, CAPTCHA or RECAPTCHA or IP detection include part of a system. With Actowiz Solutions, the problems might be easily solved easily with CAPTCHA or RECAPTCHA auto-detection and IP rotation.
Step 3: Running scrapers to collect data on 10 online markets. To get MAP monitoring, we need to scrape data at definite frequencies. So, whenever you prepare a scraper utilizing computer languages, you might have to start scrapers manually each day. Or, you could run the script with an extraction frequency function written with it. Though if you are using a web scraping tool like Actowiz Solutions, we could set the scraping time consequently.
Step 4: Subsequently after having data, whatever you should do is just go through the required data. Once you recognize any violating behaviors, you can react to it immediately.
Conclusion
For brands, MAP is very important. It helps in protecting the brand reputation and stop pricing war amongst resellers or retailers and offer more alternatives to do marketing. To deal with MAP desecrations, some ideas are there and you can search thousands of ideas online within seconds. Using MAP monitoring, it’s easy to take benefits from web extraction, the most profitable way of tracking pricing across various online markets, Actowiz Solutions is particularly helpful.
For more information, contact Actowiz Solutions now! You can also reach us for all your mobile app scraping and web scraping services requirements.
