As a manufacturer or importer you rarely sell straight to the end customer. Your products move through resellers, online shops and retail chains. You set a suggested price, an RRP or MAP/MSRP, and this is where a strange blind spot begins. You do not know exactly who is selling your brand, at what price they are doing it, or whether someone has gone below the agreed level.
This is not a small detail. When one reseller starts dumping your product, everyone else who respects the pricing policy feels it immediately. In this post we look at two things in order. First, how to find your resellers in the first place. Then, how to monitor their prices and availability systematically, without clicking through dozens of shops by hand every week.
Why you can’t see your own resellers
It seems logical that a manufacturer knows who sells its products. In reality the picture is fuzzy. Some resellers buy directly from you, some buy through a wholesaler, some buy through another reseller. At the end of the chain there might be an online shop you never had a direct contract with, yet who keeps your product on the shelf and prices it anyway.
The result is that the official reseller list in your spreadsheet and the actual market drift further apart over time. New shops appear. An old one quietly drops out. You find out only when something goes wrong, for example when a large customer calls and asks why one shop sells your product 20% cheaper than they do.
Manual searching does not scale
The first instinct is to open Google and search for your brand name. That works, but only in small volumes. The problem shows up when you try to repeat it.
- You have dozens of products and each product name has variations, EAN codes and pack sizes.
- Search results change every day, so a one-time mapping is out of date immediately.
- A new online shop that added your brand yesterday is not in your old list.
- You cannot remember what each shop’s price was last month, so you cannot see trends.
So searching as a one-off project is doable. Searching as a continuous process that has to run for every product and every market is not reasonable as manual human work.
How automatic Discovery finds your resellers
This is where machine-driven search comes in. Comprice AI Discovery does essentially the same thing you would do in Google, but systematically and on a schedule. You give it your brand and products, the system searches the public web for shops that sell them, and links the product pages it finds to your catalogue.
Two things matter here. First, Discovery runs regularly, not once. If a new online shop adds your product next month, it appears in your view without you doing anything. Second, the system matches products across shops using things like the EAN code and the product name, so you are actually comparing the same product, not something that happens to have a similar name.
The honest limit matters here. Discovery finds what is publicly visible on the web. If a reseller sells your product only behind closed price lists or a login, a public search will not see it. Most retail shops show prices publicly, so in practice this covers a large part of the market, but it is not magic.
Monitoring prices against RRP and MAP/MSRP
Once the resellers are found, the question becomes the next one. Who sells at what price compared to your suggested price. Here you set the baseline. You enter the RRP or MAP/MSRP level for each product and the system compares every shop’s price against it.
In practice it looks like this:
- For each product you see all resellers and their current price side by side.
- If a shop goes below the level you set, it is flagged with the difference.
- You see when a violation started and how long it has lasted, not just the current state.
- Alerts tell you when a price changes, so you do not have to look yourself.
For example, if your RRP is 49,90 € and one shop drops the price to 39,90 €, you see the difference right away, not only when another reseller complains. Comprice sends several alert types, including price drops and going below the suggested price. You can read more on the MAP/MSRP monitoring page, and the reseller price monitoring article gives a practical view.
What Comprice does not do
Comprice is an advisory tool. It never changes a price itself and never messages a reseller on your behalf. It shows you what is happening on the market, and you decide how to respond, whether to contact the reseller, review the contract or leave things as they are. Comprice also sees only public prices and stock. It does not see anyone’s sales, margin or customer data.
The availability matrix, who keeps you on the shelf and who dropped out
Price is not the only thing worth watching. Just as important is who stocks your product at all. The availability matrix shows, for each product, which resellers currently sell it and which do not.
This reveals things a price table does not show. If a reseller has quietly removed your product from its catalogue, you see it in the matrix. If several shops are out of stock at the same time, that is a signal of a supply problem. If a new shop appears in the matrix, that is a new reseller you may not have known about. Together with position history you also see how your product’s visibility changes over time, not just today’s state.
Where to start
The simplest way to tell whether this fits you is to add a few products from your brand and let Discovery run. You will fairly quickly see who sells your product and whether prices hold at the suggested level. For more context from the manufacturer’s point of view, see the solution for manufacturers page.
Start today. Try it free and let Discovery run. If you would rather see how this works for a manufacturer first, look at the solution for manufacturers.