Columbus, OH—August 31, 2016—Today, ORIS Intelligence, provider of actionable insights that preserve pricing integrity for manufacturers, announces that 100 customers are leveraging its innovative new platform that monitors and enforces Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) across all channels. With less than 90 days until Cyber Monday, new data from ORIS reveals that pricing violations are most likely to occur in November and December – and on average, violations are priced nearly 18 percent below the minimum advertised price (MAP) per product.

 

The ORIS platform actively monitors each sellers’ website, every three hours, every day of the week, to stay ahead of the frequent price adjustments made by online retailers and marketplaces. ORIS stores the pricing history indefinitely and sends daily reports, so manufacturers can see every price change, who moved first and note those retailers who have a history of violations.

 

“Every manufacturer with a MAP Policy struggles with enforcement.  Before we had the power of the ORIS platform, it was flat out impossible to catch all the MAP issues hurting our resellers, who were losing business to unauthorized sellers, most of whom couldn’t even answer an end user question,” said Ami Stevens, Reseller Policy Compliance Manager for InFocus Corporation, the inventor of the modern-day projector and pioneer of the category. “By enforcing our pricing policies, we ultimately protect our brand, and our customers, by ensuring the merchants marketing our products, are doing so at fair prices. ORIS monitors everything, all the time, so we can easily, and cost effectively, maintain our MAP Policy and continue focusing our efforts on delivering innovative collaboration solutions.”

 

Prior to deploying ORIS, InFocus reported nearly 1,200 violations for the month of January alone – after ORIS, that number dropped nearly 68 percent to 373 violations in August.

 

“Having a pricing policy and enforcing it are two different beasts,” said Pamela Springer, CEO of ORIS Intelligence. “ORIS provides a truly holistic view of online and in-store selling channels to provide manufacturers with confidence in supporting their sellers in enforcing price parity, so that margin is preserved and sellers can properly market the product and support the end customer.    MAP levels the purchasing playing field by eliminating the price search from the game and allows the customer to purchase based on their needs, location and preference – and as a result, manufactures can maintain pricing integrity and continue to innovate products, while sellers can focus on customer service.”

 

Springer, a veteran executive with more than 20 years experience growing technology startups, re-starts and IPOs, joined ORIS last year. Under her guidance, ORIS has commercialized the SaaS application and now supports over 350 brands. Moreover, the company has increased employees by 100 percent year over year and expects to double that number in 2017.

 

With the holidays fast approaching, the time is now for manufacturers to understand where they fall when it comes to MAP and violations. ORIS has compiled its top tips to help lay the foundation for selling success this season and beyond:

 

·      Don’t forget the little guy: Monitor big marketplaces as well as smaller, independent websites. Amazon is often blamed for starting price wars, but in reality, they are monitoring other websites and often are the first to match another site.

 

·      Keep a Log: Compile detailed notes of the history of all seller violations and your correspondence to them in one place so it’s easy to find…and easier to identify patterns and repeat offenders.

 

·      No Rest for the Weary: Don’t take a break on weekends. It’s important to monitor nights and weekends – ORIS data shows the most violated day of the week is Sunday followed by Saturday.  This is a common game played.

 

·      Go Beyond Google: Don’t just rely on shopping comparison engines (CSEs) such as Google Shopping, to monitor your pricing. This is particularly true when analyzing pricing on nights and weekends. CSEs generally acquire their data from data feeds, and it may take hours or days for them to pull a new pricing feed and update their reports.  During those after-business hours, be sure to click all the way through to the site to verify the price.

 

ORIS currently supports brands in a variety of industries including Outdoor, Consumer Electronics, Footwear and Apparel, Housewares, Auto-Aftermarket and Cycling. For more information, visit http://www.orisintel.com/.

 

About ORIS Intelligence

ORIS Intelligence delivers actionable insights that preserve pricing integrity for manufacturers to help them protect their brand. Built from the inside-out, ORIS Intelligence’s cloud-based platform helps solve the complex selling challenges of today’s manufacturers by patrolling and enforcing minimum advertised price (MAP) everywhere their products are sold online, including discovering unknown sellers. With ongoing, frequently-updated reports, a streamlined user interface and hands-on customer support, ORIS Intelligence lives at the intersection of all channels to ensure manufacturers can better support trusted retail partners, while maximizing margins and increasing revenue.

Favorite