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As a brand manufacturer, you know how important your seller chain is to your business. This network of sellers enables your brand to reach a wider audience and grow your base of loyal clients. Because this chain is so critical, a single weak point could prove disastrous for a brand manufacturer in any industry.

For this reason, you need complete oversight into each link of your seller chain, allowing you to strengthen your relationships with those included in your brand's network. But how can you pinpoint any problems and work to address them? Today, we'll take a look at the best practices and top technological tools to help you gain control of your seller chain, one of the most important parts of your brand.

Increasing complexity of the seller chain

Just a handful of years ago, the seller chain was much simpler and easier to manage. Now, though, with the influx of e-commerce communities and sellers, this network has considerably changed.

In order for brands to reach their sales and company goals, they must work with an array of different sellers, including top names like Amazon, eBay and Etsy, to expand the reach of their organization. While this approach offers numerous benefits for the company, it also adds to the complexity of the seller chain.

In this type of environment, it's absolutely critical to have the right oversight into each seller included in the chain. This ensures that each business is adhering to all partnership agreements, including any pricing policies. Any listing that skews below this benchmark undercuts the brand – and represents a weak link in the chain.

Strengthening your chain

Strengthening the links in your chain doesn't just benefit these sellers, but is considerably advantageous for your business as well. There are a few best practices you can use to help create the best seller chain possible, including:

• Ensure open communication: One of the first steps to take here is to create an environment of open communication among your brand and all of the sellers you work with. This allows the stakeholders of each organization to help guarantee that everyone is on the same page, that any kinks are smoothed out and that all agreements are being adhered to.
• Understand your audience: It's likely that the different sellers in your chain are popular among varying segments of your customer audience. It's important to understand the types of customers that each seller works with, as well as the preferences and needs of these individuals. In this way, each seller can work to provide the best customer service possible to their segment of your brand's audience.
• Leverage key performance metrics: Inbound Logistics noted that having key performance indicators in place for your seller chain can help support your company goals. It's important to not only set these benchmarks, but also closely track each KPI to accurately measure the performance of your entire seller chain.

Boosting visibility with the right technological tools

In addition to these helpful strategies, it's essential that your company has the right technology in place to support its seller chain. One of the most critical solutions here is a price monitoring tool. This important asset can help provide the visibility your brand requires to strengthen the partnerships you have with your sellers while ensuring that your price policy is followed.

PriceSpider's proprietary MAP Guard technology goes beyond price monitoring, and can also support your brand's policies related to MAP, MSRP, PMAP, UPP and UMRP. With this tool, your brand has the power to monitor all of the online sellers in your chain, enforce your seller policies and easily discover any weak links. MAP Guard provides your company with the ability to pinpoint violators and helps you back these up with a screenshot of the violation, ensuring you're able to address any issues.

To find out more about MAP Guard and how it can help your business and your seller chain, visit our website and contact PriceSpider today.