Detection guide
A MAP violation is a retailer publicly advertising your product below the minimum advertised price your policy sets. The listing is legitimate and the product is genuine — what breaks is the pricing floor your whole dealer network agreed to. One seller under floor resets the market for everyone else, and your best retailers notice the same day.
Detection sounds trivial — compare a price against a floor — but doing it across every listing, every retailer, and every hour is where programs fall apart. This guide covers what violations look like in the wild, why spot checks and batch reports miss them, and exactly how Pricelysis monitors advertised prices against your MAP floor.
Most violations don't announce themselves. They arrive as ordinary retail behaviour that happens to cross your floor:
The common thread: violations are transient, distributed, and usually invisible from a single manual check. The retailer's homepage looks fine; the damage is on page four of their catalog, or on a marketplace offer you didn't know existed.
Price-monitoring tools were mostly built for the opposite job — helping retailers reprice against competitors — so they check a handful of times per day and surface data, not violations. A price that dips below your floor overnight and recovers by morning never appears in a twice-daily batch report, and every hour a violation goes undetected is an hour your compliant retailers spend watching it.
The second failure is structural: a price feed without your MAP list attached can't tell a violation from a sale. Detection requires the floor per SKU, the mapping from each listing to that SKU, and the discipline to re-check on a schedule — not a spreadsheet someone updates when they remember.
The third is evidence. A number in a dashboard is not enforceable. By the time someone screenshots the listing manually, the price has often reverted — and a violation you can't prove is a violation you can't enforce.
Pricelysis runs scheduled monitoring on every listing you track. A scheduler wakes every fifteen minutes and queues each listing that's due for a check, with per-domain pacing so retailers see normal, polite traffic rather than a scraping burst.
Each retail domain gets a stable browser persona, conditional requests skip unchanged pages, robots.txt is respected, and JavaScript-rendered prices are handled by a real rendering pipeline. Heavily defended sites route through rotating proxies.
Sale-price versus list-price disambiguation, currency normalization, and a durable price snapshot recorded on every check — so you can show exactly how long a violation lasted, not just that it happened.
Every extracted price is compared against the MAP floor on your product catalog for that SKU. Below floor, Pricelysis records the violation with the exact percentage under MAP, links it to the seller, and immediately queues a timestamped screenshot — captured while the listing still shows the price.
Violations land in one inbox with the evidence attached and a drafted notice. Nothing sends without your approval, and your authorized-dealer safe list travels with every workflow.
MAP enforcement is contract enforcement, so the evidence bar is about proving the advertised price and the retailer's obligation:
If you don't have a written policy yet, start there — Pricelysis publishes a free MAP policy template.
Triage on three axes: depth below floor, who the violator is, and recurrence. A first-time, shallow violation from a major authorized retailer is usually a pricing-team mistake and a relationship conversation. A repeat, deep violation from a marketplace seller you don't recognize is a different problem — often an unauthorized seller or grey-market source wearing a MAP-violation costume.
Fix sources, not symptoms. One undercutting offer on a shared listing drags every automated repricer down with it; resolving the seller at the bottom of the stack recovers the whole listing. That's frequently a Buy Box problem as much as a MAP problem.
A public advertisement of your product below your MAP floor by a retailer bound by your policy. MAP governs advertised price, not sold price — a retailer may sell below MAP at checkout under most policies, but cannot publish a below-floor price. Cart-only pricing sits in a grey zone your policy language should address explicitly.
A unilateral MAP policy — one the manufacturer sets and enforces independently — is generally permissible under US antitrust law, and similar frameworks exist in many jurisdictions. It is not the same as price fixing, which involves agreement between competitors. Specifics depend on jurisdiction; consult counsel for contested matters.
Detection speed is set by crawl cadence. Pricelysis schedules each tracked listing on its own cadence — up to hourly — and every detection is timestamped at the moment the price was observed, with the screenshot queued immediately.
No. Amazon, Walmart, and eBay stay out of MAP disputes — pricing agreements are between you and your retailers. Marketplace takedown tools address counterfeits and policy violations, not price floors. MAP enforcement runs through your dealer agreements.
Yes — the floor comes from your own catalog, so a promotion you've blessed is reflected by updating the floor or pausing the SKU. And because enforcement is human-approved, an alert on an approved promotion dies in your inbox instead of becoming an awkward letter to a partner.
Follow the notice-and-cure sequence in your agreement: document, notify, give them a cure window. Most first violations are repricer or promo mistakes, not defiance. Pricelysis drafts the notice with the evidence attached; you decide the tone and whether it sends.
Run a free brand audit. We scan your active SKUs against every violation type on this page and return a PDF with timestamped evidence for each match.
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