4 Reasons to Monitor Resellers with an Eagle Eye

Marketers at manufacturing companies face a significant challenge in making sure resellers comply with minimum advertised pricing (MAP) policies. They must police a large group of disparate companies across a wide number of online shopping engines and Product Listing Ads (PLAs), and do it for thousands of constantly changing SKUs. It’s a huge headache to do manually. Plus, it’s easy to miss an important violation. The Search Monitor’s MAP Compliance service allows manufacturers to set up the Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) policy for their products, detect & halt MAP violations, and identify unauthorized re-sellers. And it now includes Amazon coverage! So, why monitor resellers? Here are four reasons we’ve learned from talking with our clients:

4 Reasons to Monitor Resellers With An Eagle Eye

1. Find MAP Violations: The number of products a manufacturer has to monitor can be in the thousands, and manually monitoring those volumes can lead to reporting and tracking errors. With our MAP Compliance Tools, manufacturers provide a list of products, authorized prices, and authorized resellers. Shopping engines are monitored for your specific rules, violations are flagged, and manufacturers are sent email alerts for MAP and reseller violations.
2. Find Unauthorized Resellers:  Our monitoring tools allow you to enter in an unlimited list of SKUs or Product Names and quickly see the sellers for each product. These alerts and reports also include time-stamped screenshots showing the issue, and tools to help you remove the unauthorized seller.
3. Catch Fraudulent Products (Amazon): For many manufacturers, Amazon is their biggest reseller channel. Every manufacturer needs to schedule automatic alerts showing when their products appear on Amazon. This information lets them easily review and stop the sale of fraudulent or counterfeit versions of their products.
4. Monitor Resellers’ Search Engine Visibility: Here’s an ad monitoring use case you wouldn’t expect, but saves our clients lots of money. They monitor their individual reseller’s visibility on major search engines, for paid ads, organic listings, and PLA listings. We combine data on reach, frequency, and rank to provide each advertiser with a Search Marketing Visibility Score. Manufacturers can learn which resellers are doing the best job at appearing to customers (and reward them!), and help their low-performing resellers improve their visibility.

How To Monitor Resellers

Let technology do the heavy lifting in reseller monitoring. Here’s how leading manufacturers use our monitoring tools to keep an eagle eye on their resellers.

• Shopping Engines Monitored.  Includes Google Shopping, PLAs, Amazon, eBay, Shopzilla, Pricegrabber, and others.
• Amazon Coverage: Provides near-real-time coverage of Amazon sellers
• MAP Violations.  Detect when resellers advertise below-MAP prices.
• Unauthorized Resellers.  See a list of advertisers for your SKUs to quickly detect unauthorized resellers.
• Automatic Alerts.  Get email alerts for MAP and other reseller violations.

One of our sample reseller monitoring reports is above, showing MAP violations. Contact us to learn more about reseller monitoring and MAP Compliance, and to see data like this for your affiliates, partners and competitors.