Amazon & Walmart Price Monitoring

In the process of doing MAP violation tracking for our customers we also provide all the data for products that we find a MAP violation for or not. This is the result of MAP violation monitoring being a function of price monitoring in general. What that allows our users to do is peel back more layers on changes they might be making on a marketplace (like Amazon, Walmart, Home Depot) or on their retailers (Wayfair, Hayneedle, Target, etc).

For the example I looked at one product, of several thousands, we track for one of our clients over a ~30 day time span and there are 18 different price changes, 10 by Walmart and eight by Amazon. Six of those days Amazon had the premium price whereas the bulk of the days that was held by Walmart. However, it is slightly entertaining to see that pricing on Amazon would drop by a mere penny from day-t0-day to stay in front pricing on Walmart. This actually happened over and 11 day span before both were advertising a new higher price that maintained a price parity with each other.

A couple of side notes:

• None of this pricing action actually violated our client’s MAP policies with either marketplace. In fact they do not have MAP set for this product as you might have noticed that “US” and “CA” are grayed out, these selectors allow a user to overlap the MAP price with extracted data.
• Both data points on this price chart rely on Amazon and Walmart as a retailer and does not include marketplace sellers. Those sellers are price monitored as well, but are displayed slightly different. Like so:
• Price tracking websites like Amazon, Walmart, or Wayfair are not always about some shadowy competitor price tracking another competitor in some questionably dubious price fixing scheme. This use-case is a perfect example where a Brand is able to view their advertised product pricing on retailers and make correlations between changes they make behind the scenes on their side and how it impacts the retailers and marketplaces they sell on.
• Walmart and Amazon price monitoring is not easy, but finding the right partner can make it seem so at times.