MAP Violation Checker

This MAP pricing violation checker compares your minimum advertised price (MAP) list against the live or listed prices you collect across resellers and marketplaces, then flags every product priced below its policy floor. Paste two columns of data and get an instant, line-by-line pass/fail report you can hand to your channel team.

What it checks

For each row that matches a product identifier across your MAP list and your observed-price list, the checker validates and computes:

• Violation status — whether the advertised price is below, at, or above the MAP floor for that SKU, MPN, or GTIN.
• Violation amount and percentage — the absolute dollar gap and the percent-below-MAP, so a $2 miss on a $40 fastener kit is ranked differently than a $2 miss on a $400 power tool.
• Identifier match quality — rows where an identifier appears in one file but not the other, so you can see unmatched products instead of silently dropping them.
• Tolerance handling — an optional grace threshold (for example, treat anything within 1% of MAP as compliant) to absorb rounding and currency display differences.
• Duplicate identifiers — the same SKU listed at two different prices in your observed data, which usually signals a feed or scraping error rather than a real violation.
• Blank or malformed prices — empty cells, text in a price column, or values with stray currency symbols that would otherwise produce false passes.

How MAP violation checking works

MAP is a manufacturer or brand policy that sets the lowest price a reseller may advertise a product for — distinct from the price it actually sells at. There is no government standard or check digit behind MAP; it is a contractual floor the brand defines per product and per channel. That makes the math simple but the data hygiene hard: a reliable MAP pricing violation checker is only as good as the identifiers used to line up “what the floor should be” against “what was advertised.”

The comparison runs in three steps:

1. 1
   Normalize identifiers

   SKUs, MPNs, and GTINs are trimmed, case-folded, and stripped of stray separators so that “AB-1024” and “ab1024” join correctly. Mismatched formatting is the most common reason real violations hide as “no match.”

2. 2
   Join and compare

   Each observed price is matched to its MAP floor by identifier, then compared. Prices at or above MAP pass; prices below MAP are flagged with the gap in dollars and percent.

3. 3
   Rank and explain

   Results are sorted by severity so the largest and deepest violations surface first, each with a plain-language reason (below MAP, unmatched, duplicate, or malformed).

Everything happens client-side. Your MAP list and price data are parsed in the browser tab and never uploaded, logged, or stored on a server — there is no login and no file-size limit, so you can run a full channel export without exposing pricing strategy.

Related resources

FAQ

What is a MAP violation? +

A MAP violation occurs when a reseller advertises a product below the minimum advertised price set by the manufacturer or brand. It is about the advertised or listed price, not the final transaction price. A checker flags violations by comparing observed advertised prices against the MAP floor for each matching product identifier.

How do I check MAP violations across many resellers at once? +

Export your MAP policy list (identifier plus floor price) and your observed prices (identifier plus advertised price) into two columns each, then run them through a MAP pricing violation checker. The tool joins them by SKU, MPN, or GTIN and returns every below-MAP listing in one pass, ranked by how far under the floor each one sits.

Is MAP enforcement legal? +

In the United States, brands can generally set and enforce a unilateral MAP policy on advertised prices, which is different from fixing the resale price a product sells at. This tool only detects whether an advertised price is below a floor you provide; it does not offer legal advice. Confirm your specific policy with counsel.

Why are some products showing as unmatched instead of violations? +

Unmatched rows mean an identifier exists in one file but not the other, usually because of formatting differences (dashes, leading zeros, case) or because a product is genuinely missing from one list. The checker normalizes identifiers to reduce this, but persistent gaps point to inconsistent SKU or GTIN data that needs cleaning before pricing decisions are reliable.

Is my pricing data uploaded anywhere? +

No. All parsing and comparison run locally in your browser. Your MAP list and observed prices are never sent to a server, stored, or logged, so you can analyze sensitive channel pricing without exposing it.