Trade-terms season brings twenty or more partners onto the calendar, with limited time to properly assess every margin request. Yet the reasons behind those requests vary significantly from one partner to another.
Understanding whether a retail partner is following a top-line or bottom-line strategy on your products explains what's driving a margin request.
Without that context, teams often end up prioritising based on who raised an issue first. That makes it harder to focus on the requests that matter most.
Proper planning for trade-terms season requires a clear view of pricing behaviour across the partner network. That view lets commercial teams distinguish individual requests from broader market movements and make better-informed trade-terms decisions.
Partners often ask for more margin. Using Online Mind's KPI MFLS (Most Frequent Lowest Seller) can help your team understand if your partner is focused on top or bottom line and determine whether the request is supported by the data.
Three signals are especially useful: how often a partner changes prices first, how different its prices are from the rest of the network, and how its presence across platforms and your product range has changed over time.
These signals let the team separate requests backed by market evidence from requests that aren't. Without them, a team may spend most of its effort on a partner whose prices have barely changed, while a partner making frequent changes across the catalogue gets reviewed later. Accurately tracked data allows the team to assess whether a margin request is supported by broader pricing movements, regardless of when or how the request was raised.
Price leadership looks at which partner initiates a price change and which partners follow.
Imagine two retailers selling the same product. Retailer A regularly reacts when another seller changes its price. Retailer B changes its price first, and other sellers follow shortly afterwards. Looking only at today's prices would make the two retailers look similar, but tracking the sequence shows that one moves first, every time.
Seeing price changes frequently enough to understand what happened first is what makes monitoring frequency matter. Hourly scraping is the baseline for Online Mind monitoring, which is what makes it possible to see the sequence of a price change.
A retailer that starts listing your products on more platforms, or carries more of your SKUs than before, may behave differently from when it sold through fewer channels. That shift can change how the partner prices and sells your products.
Comparing the partner against its own history shows whether the change is real.
That context helps explain why the same partner may start behaving differently across your catalogue. It also gives your commercial team additional data when assessing whether a margin request is backed by changes in the partner's business.
Price dispersion compares a partner's prices with the rest of the network on the same product. A partner that consistently sits far outside that range is worth a closer look at the context, even though a wide gap doesn't automatically mean something is wrong. Stock levels or a live promotion can explain part of it, and often both apply at the same time.
The objective is to identify the margin requests that require the most internal assessment at the start of the trade-terms season.
Bring these signals together:
When more than one signal points to the same partner, the brand has a stronger evidence base for assessing whether the related margin request reflects broader market conditions.
The ranking helps a brand see which margin requests line up with pricing behaviour across the network. It does not determine a reseller's prices or influence a partner's independent pricing decisions, and in the EU resellers remain free to set their own resale prices. Trade-terms conversations with a partner cover its commercial terms and business case. Resale prices are not part of them.
The ranking is an internal tool that helps brands understand market conditions, evaluate incoming requests, and shape their own trade-terms strategy. Any final trade-terms decision or negotiation remains subject to the brand's pre-set commercial terms and its individual agreement with each partner.
Assessing these three signals together gives a commercial team a clearer evidence base for evaluating margin requests and deciding how its own trade-terms strategy should respond.
Online Mind's Channel Monitoring gives commercial teams visibility into price changes across their resellers and partners, with hourly scraping as the baseline. This lets teams build a clearer internal picture of market conditions going into trade-terms season.
If you want to see these market signals across your own products and partner network, Online Mind can walk you through the analysis using your own SKUs.
Pricing decisions remain with each seller, as required under EU competition law. Online Mind's monitoring data is used exclusively to inform each brand's own internal trade-terms strategy and is never shared with, or used to influence, individual sellers.