MarqVision ships a major update to Marq AI price monitoring

• “Unauthorized sales” outside a manufacturer's official distribution network hurt brand pricing policies and consumer trust
• Brands can now see whether fair prices hold on Korea's largest e-commerce platform, and the financial impact of enforcement against unauthorized sales
• MarqVision will keep working to protect brand value and build a fair e-commerce ecosystem

MarqVision (CEO Mark Lee), an AI-based integrated IP solution company, announced a major update to its price monitoring service, which detects the products and sellers that erode brand value online through indiscriminate discounting.

As e-commerce platforms multiply and registering as an individual seller gets easier, anyone can sell products, and unauthorized sales outside manufacturers' official distribution networks are surging. Products sold without a company's or brand's official authorization are hard to trace back to their source or distribution path, and they are often priced far too low to rank at the top of a platform, which can hurt a brand's pricing policy and consumer trust. Even sellers with official contracts lose their price competitiveness, and brands have been struggling with significant lost revenue.

Since May last year, MarqVision's price monitoring service has identified official sellers selling at prices different from those agreed in their contracts, and tracked in detail whether unofficial sellers are selling a product, which sellers hold a large share of transactions, and how product prices change. Reflecting how quickly the e-commerce ecosystem is changing, this update adds ▲a view of whether fair prices are being maintained on Korea's largest e-commerce platform ▲analysis of the financial impact of enforcement against unauthorized sales.

That platform, with gross merchandise value of KRW 55 trillion last year, is known to run a so-called “lowest-price matching system”: if a competing online store sells the same product for less, it automatically lowers its own selling price to match. This has long been criticized, because brands selling there end up with their products at the lowest price online after the price war, and have no choice but to absorb the lost revenue when their fair pricing collapses.

With the update, brands can see at a glance how the average price of a product, as sold by many sellers on that platform, compares with its fair price. Sellers suspected of unauthorized sales because of excessively low prices can be reported to the marketplace and taken down through MarqVision's own system, and MarqVision also quantifies how much financial loss that enforcement prevented. Listings on other marketplaces suspected of triggering lowest-price matching can be taken down at the same time, so each brand can use the feature to hold its fair price line and recover revenue.

Many companies, including Lotte Chilsung, Hangil Trading (the official importer of Villeroy & Boch) and Brand501, were already using the price monitoring service. With this update, companies and brands in daily necessities and F&B, categories consumers buy often, are expected to manage their prices even more effectively.

“With this price monitoring update, we wanted to help companies protect the brand value and trust they have spent years building, and to help create an environment where consumers can buy trustworthy, officially authorized products,” said Mark Lee, CEO of MarqVision. “MarqVision will keep doing everything it can to build a fair e-commerce ecosystem that works for both brands and consumers.”