Knowing this trick can help you spot all Targeted price violations any time
We have recently published a post about how to handle violations of the agreed (MAP) prices and solutions for manufacturers/brands. We highlighted possible solutions in order to prevent this situation for manufacturers and brands. After listing the important solutions for MAP monitoring, finally we wanted to share one example that we came across recently.
This tactic is frequently used by dealers to ‘trick’ the manufacturers, making them think that they stick to the agreed price. Complex and cruel market conditions unfortunately force dealers to discover new ways in order to survive. Since we are providing price monitoring service for professionals who want to monitor their competitor’s prices, we have a chance to work with both manufacturers and dealers from different sorts of industries and of course we have acquired quite a lot of experience in this field from observing their practices.
Let’s talk about the details of our recent example.
In the following example, a manufacturer (our client) and his dealer are from the music industry. As it is seen, this site lowers their prices below MAP on weekends regularly, believing that there will be no one to check or document such behavior, and then they are raising it back up early on Monday.
We would like to point out that it is very common in all sorts of industries that the manufacturers monitor how dealers sell their products, but it is also very tightly-related to the music industry. The picture above illustrates what is really familiar to us, since we are well-established in this industry.
- This picture indicates that the price change that also violated the Targeted price was detected on Saturday June-18, 07.02AM when the price dropped to 179.99 USD – the red color represents Targeted price violation
- A few days later, Price2Spy checked the price on this link and captured a price change on Monday June-20, 07:16 , so the price was back at 199.99 USD
What were our suggestions for our manufacturer client?
After double checking this site’s behavior we were sure about the site which violates MAP from time to time. In order to pin-point exact timing of when they are changing their pricing, we suggested our client to set his price checks to take place more frequently (every 3 hours) which would enable him to react more promptly. It would mean upgrading his Price2Spy account to a Premium plan.
Once again, as we mentioned in our previous blog post, we can help you in preserving your brand’s value and monitoring whether your retailers respect the agreement on prices that you have. However, the best way for manufacturers and the retailers is to communicate openly about the conditions – work on policy terms and find a reasonable way to sell their products without causing problems to each other.
