The past several months have been a pain with regards to MAP policies. The manufacturers of my two most popular product lines have cracked down on MAP violators, and so I now have to show the MAP price, and encourage the visitor to add to cart to see my real price.
Yesterday I got an email from another manufacturer saying that I was violating their MAP policy. This one was different in a few respects from other manufacturer policies. First, the policy does not allow the retailer to show the real price once the item is added to the shopping cart. The shopping cart price has to be the MAP price.
I can't imagine that too many customers will proceed with their credit card information when they don't know if the MAP price is what's going to be charged to their cards. With many shopping cart systems, the card would actually be charged the price in the cart. This doesn't seem like it could be legal. Could it?
Another interesting provision in the policy states that the manufacturer will not act on complaints about other retailers violating their MAP policies. The reason I find this interesting is that the biggest violators of MAP policies for this manufacturer are the largest retailers (think river in South America, etc). With one manufacturer, I regularly send them a list of URL's to below-MAP ads by the South American river. The manufacturer has reached a point where they may drop the MAP policy, as they can't get the river to cooperate.
If there was a way to find out if having to show MAP in the cart was not legal, I'd confront the manufacturer on this. I suspect there's not an easy way, so I will just stop selling their products.
