How to set up and review MAP pricing for resellers

1. Introduction

Throughout this guide we follow a fictional manufacturer, Alder & Cove Lighting, delivering MAP-governed pricing to its dealer tier — a shared catalog it calls Authorized Lighting Dealers — where fictional reseller Beacon Home Supply is assigned. Every company, SKU, price, and date shown is fictional demo data, and none of it is legal guidance: MAP policy itself is a commercial and legal matter between you, your counsel, and your partners. This guide covers the data and delivery side only.

The platform pieces involved: Catalog Rules for reseller pricing, the price-update workflow described in the price and inventory updates guide for maintaining MAP values, and the Reseller Portal where partners receive the result.

2. What MAP pricing means in a reseller catalog workflow

MAP — minimum advertised price — is the floor you ask partners to respect when advertising your products. In a catalog workflow, MAP is data you deliver: a price field maintained per product, published into the catalogs your resellers receive, so every partner sees the floor right next to their own buying price.

Hold the scope boundary from the start: InventaCloud carries, computes, and displays pricing on platform surfaces — the portal view, downloads, and orders built from the catalog. What a reseller advertises on their own storefront is between you and them under your MAP agreement; the platform doesn't monitor reseller websites or detect violations, and no software makes an unwilling partner compliant. What clean MAP delivery does do is remove the honest excuses: “we never got the updated floor” stops being possible.

3. MAP is different from MSRP, cost, and reseller price

MAP fails most often by being confused with its neighbors. Four numbers, four jobs:

In your product data these live as separate price roles — the same discipline covered in the column-mapping guide. If your source spreadsheet has one ambiguous “Price” column doing several of these jobs, stop and fix that first; no rule downstream can recover a distinction the data never made.

4. Before configuring MAP

Three prerequisites make MAP setup mechanical instead of archaeological: your catalog is imported and mapped with distinct price roles (cost, price, MSRP, and a MAP column where you use one); your MAP policy exists as a business document — which products carry a floor, at what values, effective when — because the platform delivers your policy, it doesn't invent one; and your resellers are set up with catalog access, whether invited directly or approved from the marketplace. If any of those are missing, start with the import guide and the catalog-sharing guide, then come back.

5. Verify source MAP and pricing data

Every downstream number is computed from, or displayed out of, your source data — so audit it before building rules. Three checks catch most problems:

• Coverage: does every product that should carry a floor actually have a MAP value? A blank MAP cell delivers a blank — resellers see no floor on that product.
• Sanity: is MAP above cost and below MSRP on each row? A MAP of $13.90 where you meant $139.00 is the kind of typo partners screenshot.
• Cleanliness: are the values numeric? Text like “CALL” or “TBD” in a price column is a data problem to resolve at import time, not something to ship to partners.

The import workflow's validation rules can flag rows where price fields are blank or out of range before they enter a catalog — worth configuring once if MAP data arrives from a source you don't control.

6. Decide which resellers the pricing applies to

In InventaCloud, pricing rules belong to a catalog, and they shape what every reseller assigned to that catalog receives. So the practical unit of a pricing tier is a shared catalog:

One catalog per tier keeps terms consistent and maintenance sane: a new dealer joining the standard program is simply assigned the Authorized Lighting Dealers catalog and inherits its pricing from minute one. A reseller who needs genuinely bespoke terms gets their own catalog with its own rules — deliberate overhead that keeps exceptions visible instead of buried.

7. Choose the applicable catalog

With tiers organized as catalogs, choosing where the rule lives is choosing who it affects:

Rules on the Authorized Lighting Dealers catalog touch nothing in the Design Trade Program catalog, and vice versa — each catalog carries its own rule set, its own reseller assignments, and its own published result. That isolation is what makes a pricing change safe to reason about: the blast radius is exactly one catalog's reseller list.

8. Create or edit the pricing rule

Pricing rules live in the catalog's editor under Catalog Rules. A price-adjustment rule has four settings, named exactly as you'll see them:

Each rule also carries an Active toggle, so a rule can exist without applying (section 17). The same editor holds the catalog's include/exclude rules — which products the tier can see at all — covered in the Catalog Rules guide.

9. Apply a pricing adjustment where needed

Alder & Cove's standard tier is cost plus 18 percent — a percentage increase on the cost role:

Confirm the base role before the percentage — +18% over cost and +18% over MSRP are radically different offers. And note what the platform is doing: exactly the arithmetic you configured, on every row, every rebuild. The judgment about whether that arithmetic lands where your program intends is the review work in sections 13–15.

10. Store and review the MAP value

Your MAP value rides in the catalog as its own price field — stored with the product, reviewed by you, delivered to partners. Two ways to keep it populated, and they compose:

At import: map your source file's MAP column to the MAP price role like any other field. Between imports: update MAP per SKU through the price-update workflow — partial updates that touch only the price fields you include, keyed by brand and SKU, with history kept (see the updates guide). Publish the MAP column into the catalog's shared view, and every assigned reseller sees the floor beside their price — one authoritative source instead of a PDF price sheet aging in inboxes.

11. Understand how markup and MAP interact

Your adjustment rule and your MAP values are independent pieces of data doing different jobs — and the platform does not referee between them:

Be clear-eyed about this: the rule engine computes your configured math and does not compare the result against MAP. If a stacked discount drives a computed price below the floor, the platform will deliver exactly that number — which is why the above/below test in section 14 is part of setup, not an optional extra. The floor governs what partners advertise; their buying price sitting below MAP is normal and is precisely the margin between them.

12. Review rule priority and conflicts

A catalog can hold several price rules, and order matters — as the editor itself puts it, rules run in the order you add them, so you can stack them:

Each rule reads the running value the previous rule left, and the last write wins — there is no automatic conflict detection deciding intent for you. Keep the stack short and legible, and when two rules touch the same field, make the order say what you mean. Then verify with your eyes, not your assumptions: that's the next section.

13. Preview the reseller result

Before anything reaches a partner, browse the catalog as its resellers will receive it — products after include/exclude rules, prices after the adjustment stack:

Fictional numbers. This is the single most valuable habit in pricing work: the rule you meant and the rule you built diverge exactly once — in front of a partner — unless the preview catches it privately first.

14. Compare calculated prices with MAP — above and below the floor

Now the deliberate MAP check. Pick real products from both sides of the line, read the calculated price and the MAP value together, and record a verdict for each — the review is manual and explicit, because the engine won't do it for you:

Which comparison matters depends on the role: a partner's buy price sitting below MAP is normal margin, but a delivered selling or advertised price role your program expects to respect the floor must sit at or above it. Test with intent — one product comfortably above the floor, one near it, one where a stacked promo rule pushes the calculated result past where your program wants it — and fix anything that reads wrong at its source: the MAP data (section 10), the rule stack (section 12), or the catalog configuration. Never hand-edit downstream output.

15. Verify the reseller portal and delivered output

The preview shows intent; the portal shows delivery. After the catalog rebuilds, confirm the endgame the way a partner experiences it: the portal catalog view showing your price, MAP, and MSRP columns side by side, and a downloaded file carrying the same numbers — because downloads export the same permitted, rule-applied view the portal renders. If your partners consume feeds into their own systems, the same applied data is what those feeds read. One pass of “open it like Beacon would” closes the loop between the program you designed and the file a partner actually loads on Monday morning.

16. Update MAP values when the source catalog changes

MAP programs move — annual updates, new introductions, corrections. The update path is the same discipline every time:

Per-SKU price updates are partial by design — an update touches only the price fields you include, so a MAP-only file adjusts floors without disturbing cost or MSRP, and price history keeps the paper trail. Timing note: there is no future-dated scheduling here — changes take effect when applied and the catalog rebuilds. For a January 1 program change, prepare the file ahead and apply it on the day. Resellers see current data whenever they visit; for a change partners must acknowledge, tell them directly in your supplier message thread.

17. Disable or revise a rule

Rules are living configuration. Adjust the numbers at renewal time, or flip a rule's Active toggle off to suspend its effect while keeping it on file — a seasonal discount rule can sit inactive ten months a year and be re-enabled without rebuilding it from memory. Changes apply when the catalog rebuilds, and the rest of the catalog — assignments, MAP data, other rules — carries on untouched. Before you disable or retire a pricing rule, glance at what remains: with the promo rule off, does the base adjustment still land prices where the program intends? Thirty seconds in the preview answers it.

18. Common MAP configuration mistakes

19. MAP setup checklist

Common questions