how-does-map-monitoring-utilize-web-scraping

Because the ecommerce marketplace is emerging, we can observe that online marketplaces are growing and increasingly branded products are getting sold by thousands of resellers and retailers around the world. A few brands may not see the fact that a few sellers as well as resellers, are selling branded products at lower prices to get more customers, which results in negative effects on that brand itself.

To preserve the brand reputation, you must use MAP policy as a code of conduct for resellers and retailers.

What is MAP?

What is MAP

MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) is the pre-decided minimum pricing for certain products, which authorized resellers or retailers agree not to sell or advertise below.

For instance, if any shoe brand has set the MAP for its product A at $100, all the authorized resellers and retailers, either on online marketplaces or brick-and-mortar stores, are pleased to price not less than $100. Or else, resellers and retailers will get punished as per the MAP agreement they have signed.

Frankly Speaking, a MAP Policy could benefit in the given aspects:

  • Maintaining the brand value and awareness
  • Guaranteed fair pricing as well as competition amongst resellers and retailers
  • Preventing underpricing as well as pricing wars to safeguard profit margins

Why is Applying a MAP policy Hard for any Brand?

1. Physical Retailers

Physical retailers or franchise stores are amongst the most well-known ways of reselling products from certain brands. To do MAP Violation monitoring for front store retailers, we can simply use a financial system to monitor their transactions efficiently.

Though, a brand cannot ensure all sold items submitted by physical retailers are 100% real. This might require more manual work to make it work seamlessly.

2. Marketplace Resellers Online

Compared to physical retailers, the situation with marketplace retailers online is more complex.

An assembly of online marketplaces

If you look at the research about Web Retailer, we can get a simple idea about a number of the world’s best online markets. There are more than 150 key all-category marketplaces around the world, leave along the limitless niche.

sample data

Many online retailers could sell products in different Online Marketplaces

Undoubtedly, most online retailers would select multiple online marketplaces for selling products that could bring more benefits and traffic.

Unknown Resellers with no Authorization

Despite those selling products using authorization, a few individual resellers are selling copycat products, which a brand could not be well aware of.

Therefore, price monitoring of some products across many online marketplaces at the same time might be hard for the brands.

How to Identify MAP Violations and Protect a Brand on Online Marketplaces?

For customary physical retails, any brand requires a financial system for recording data to get MAP monitoring. We have introduced a broadly used but ignored tech-web scraping for marketplace resellers online that can effectively assist using MAP monitoring.

Therefore, how does a brand utilize web scraping to find if resellers or retailers violate a MAP policy?

For example, an online reseller sells your products on ten different online marketplaces, including Amazon.com, ebay.com, Taobao.com, and Flipkart.com. Tmall.com, Walmart.com, Tokopedia.com, Rakuten.com, Target.com, and JD.com.

Step 1: Understand What Data You Want?

Normally, to do MAP monitoring, the data required include product details and prices.

Map Pricing Monitor

Step 2: Select a Proper Method for making Web Scrapers

We have to make 10 web scrapers for collecting information from corresponding marketplaces as well as extracting data in certain frequencies.

In case you’re a programmer, just write down 10 scripts for achieving web scraping. Although the limitations are:

  • Difficulty in maintaining scrapers if website layout gets changed.
  • Difficulty in dealing with IP rotations and CAPTCHA or RECAPTCHA.

A substitute option is utilizing a web extraction tool like X-Byte Scraper. For coders as well as non-coders, it could contribute a great deal to data scraping.

 

1. Point-to-click interface: As X-Byte Scraper works with job template mode, everybody can do a task with many clicks.

X-Byte Scraper

2. Auto-Generated Crawler: Moreover, the up-to-date launched X-Byte Scraper 8.1 has updated its algorithm, allowing data auto-detection and producing a crawler in minutes.

3. Web Scraping Auxiliary Functions: While extracting data, we could meet an anti-blocking system. In the majority of cases, CAPTCHA/RECAPTCHA and IP detection are a part of this system. In X-Byte Scraper, these problems could be solved very efficiently using its CAPTCHA/RECAPTCHA or IP rotation as well as auto-detection.

Step 3: Run Scrapers to Collect Data on 10 Online Marketplaces

To do MAP monitoring, we have to extract data at certain frequencies. Therefore, when you make a scraper using a computer language, you may need to begin scrapers manually daily. Or, you can run a script constantly with the scraping frequency function given in that. Although if you utilize a data scraping tool like X-Byte Scraper, we can set an extraction time accordingly.

Step3

Step 4: After getting data, you must go through the data you have. When you identify any violating behavior, you can react to that immediately.

Conclusion

For any brand, MAP is extremely important. This can help protect your brand reputation, stop price wars amongst resellers and retailers, and offer more marketing options. To cope with MAP violations, you will have a few ideas you can search hundreds or thousands of ways online within seconds. With MAP monitoring, you can take benefit from data scraping, the most economical way of keeping track of pricing across different online marketplaces, X-Byte Scraper is specifically helpful. For more information, contact X-Byte Enterprise Crawling or ask for a free quote!