MSRP vs MAP: Price Attributes and Strategies in B2B eCommerce

A Challenging Landscape for B2B Sellers

B2B pricing is evolving rapidly. As B2B customers adopt B2C expectations, demanding personalized deals and discounts, sellers face pressure to balance tailored pricing with healthy profit margins.

Simultaneously, the rise of direct-to-consumer channels like Amazon, with their deep discounts, creates additional pricing complexities for manufacturers striving for consistent pricing strategies.

Adding to the challenge, unauthorized sellers often disregard suggested retail prices (MSRPs), engaging in price wars that damage brand value and harm authorized retailers. In this environment, understanding both MSRP and MAP is essential.

While MSRP provides a suggested baseline, MAP pricing offers manufacturers a more concrete approach to regaining pricing control, fostering fair competition, and protecting their brand’s reputation.

By setting a minimum advertised price, brands can create a more level playing field, ensuring fair competition among retailers while upholding brand value and pricing integrity.

MAP vs MSRP: Is Either Policy Right for You?

Let’s look deeper into the key difference between MAP and MSRP pricing, how they’re relevant to the world of B2B eCommerce, and how B2B manufacturers can use these different pricing strategies to their advantage.

What is Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price?

Since manufacturers can’t force retailers to sell at fixed prices (price fixing), they use the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP), which is only a suggested price. Also known as the sticker price, list price, or manufacturer’s suggested price, MSRP helps establish a retail price standard and pricing parity across the resale channel.

MSRP isn’t mandatory; retailers can price goods based on their own pricing policy. It reflects all costs—from production and distribution to retailer markup (cost structure)—serving as a guideline for retail pricing.

In industries like automotive, MSRP is crucial for transparent pricing, preventing price wars, and preserving dealer margins. However, actual prices vary due to factors like invoice price (wholesale pricing) and market demand.

Retailers often price lower than MSRP to offer perceived bargains at a lower price. Online retailers like Amazon use “list price” and “your price” to show savings. While effective, aggressive discounting can devalue the product, harming brand image.

Manufacturers can prevent this by setting minimum advertised price (MAP) policies.

What is Minimum Advertised Price?

MAP is the lowest price at which retailers can publicly advertise a product. While retailers can sell products below MAP through private negotiations, all advertised prices must adhere to this minimum. Unlike MSRP (Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price), which is merely a suggestion, MAP pricing places enforceable restrictions on sellers, empowering manufacturers to protect brand perception, maintain brand equity, and control pricing strategies.

Manufacturers use minimum price policies to manage reseller relationships and ensure a level playing field. By clearly outlining minimum pricing requirements in legally binding agreements, brands can prevent price wars, especially in the age of eCommerce, where undercutting is rampant. This fosters fair competition among online and offline retailers while safeguarding brand value.

Effective MAP enforcement requires investment in monitoring tools and strategies to ensure compliance. This includes clear communication with retailers and potentially building flexibility into the policy to accommodate various promotional strategies.

When implemented strategically, the Internet minimum advertised price benefits both brands and retailers by protecting profit margins, maintaining brand integrity, and creating a more stable and sustainable marketplace.

OroCommerce and Price Attributes

OroCommerce’s price attributes are custom parameters that represent price values specified per unit of quantity and in different currencies. MSRP, MAP pricing, or wholesale pricing are examples of such attributes.

When exactly should price attributes be set? For products sold in one unit of quantity or in a single currency, a product attribute will be enough to use (e.g., Price per item in USD).

However, if there are several attributes applicable to the product such as price per item or set, or it’s being sold in multiple currencies (USD and EUR), using price attributes is helpful.

With OroCommerce, sellers can easily establish any number of price attributes and store information related to the attributes. This can be the cost of premium packaging, labor per unit, or raw materials cost (production costs). The price attributes may then be used to calculate product prices. This is handy when calculating new price values using product assignment and price calculation rules.

Let’s now take a closer look at how to create and manage price attributes in OroCommerce.

Handling Price Attributes in OroCommerce

Imagine you want to keep track of the MSRP or MAP prices for all products. You can create a respective price attribute in the system and import its price values for the entire product catalog.

To create a price attribute, go to Products, Price Attributes, and click Create Price Attribute.

On the form that opens, provide the attribute name and price attribute expression field name. Then select one or more Currencies, and save the newly created price attribute.

For more details on creating price attributes, view the Price Attributes section of our User Guide.

Once you have created the price attribute, you must set the attribute values for every product. There are two ways of doing so. First, you can manually set product attributes for individual products by navigating to Products, Products, finding the required product and hovering over More Actions to click Edit.  

In the Product Prices section of the product details page that displays, enter the currency value and save your settings. Now your price attribute is ready to be used as a parameter in price list generation.

Read more about setting price attribute value in the User Guide.

Another way to add price attribute values to products is to bulk-import them by uploading a .csv format file that has been prepared in advance. Consider this option when handling a large number of items at once. When importing the .csv file, you can choose either to add and replace the existing price attribute data or clear all the existing values and add the new ones.

For example, you can add the previously missing MSRP USD value to a product or you can override it with the new one. To start importing a bulk list of product price attributes, click Products, Products, Import File, and go to the Price Attributes Data tab.

If you would like to see price attributes in action, watch the How to Set Up Price Attributes video tutorial. You’ll see  how to:

• Create a new MAP pricing attribute.
• Set MAP price attribute value for a product manually.
• Use a template to prepare your uploadable .csv file.
• Import a list of price attribute values and validate importing results.

MSRP and MAP: Which Strategy is Right For You?

Choosing between MAP and MSRP pricing isn’t just about setting prices—it’s about shaping your brand’s value and strengthening relationships with retailers.

Grasping the nuances of MAP vs MSRP empowers you to develop a pricing strategy that protects your margins, prevents price wars, and maintains a consistent brand image.

Tools like OroCommerce make it easier to implement these strategies effectively, ensuring your suggested price guidelines are followed. Ready to take control of your pricing and elevate your B2B eCommerce success?