Many product companies don't realise they're losing grip on pricing, positioning and partner relationships until it's already too late. The revenue still comes in. The dashboards still look fine. And then a distributor mentions a price they saw online, or a partner asks why a marketplace is undercutting them — and you realise you've been flying blind for months.
If you sell through marketplaces, distributors and retail partners, chances are you don't have a clear daily view of the things that quietly shape your market:
- Who is actually selling your products
- At what price they're selling them
- In which countries and through which channels
- Whether the agreements you've put in place are being respected
None of this is visible from your own order data. Your ERP tells you what you shipped. It says nothing about what happens two or three steps downstream, where your product is resold, repriced and repositioned by people you've never spoken to.
Without visibility, small problems compound
Price erosion rarely arrives as a single dramatic event. It starts with one seller shaving a few percent to win the buy box. A competitor matches it. A comparison site indexes the lower price. Within weeks, the "market price" your next partner negotiates against is no longer the one you set.
The same is true for distribution. An unauthorised seller appears on a marketplace in a country you don't actively sell into. Nobody flags it, because nobody is watching that corner of the market. By the time it surfaces, the leak has been running long enough to affect your pricing and your partner trust at the same time.
Without visibility, pricing gets diluted, unauthorised sellers slip through, and brands slowly lose grip on their own market positioning.
The frustrating part is that this isn't a strategy problem. Most teams know exactly what their pricing and distribution policy should be. The gap is operational: they simply can't see the market clearly enough, often enough, to act before the damage spreads.
Where fieldmonitor came from
Over the last few years, working with companies like SpeedComfort, ClimateBooster and heatit, I kept running into exactly this challenge. Everyone felt the symptoms. Nobody had a clean, daily picture of the market to work from.
So I started discussing it with Stef, who handles the technical side, and Tamar, who works on brand and go-to-market — former colleagues I'd helped build and scale Basebuilder with, through to its acquisition. One thing led to another. Layer by layer, version by version, we turned the problem into a platform we now use ourselves every day: fieldmonitor.
It's a market intelligence solution that helps product companies stay on top of:
- Pricing across channels and regions
- New sellers and promotional activity
- Agreement violations and unauthorised distribution
- Brand positioning across the channels where you're actually sold
Less guessing. Faster action. More control.
The goal was never to build another dashboard nobody opens. It was to replace the manual routine — checking Google Shopping, a few comparison sites, a handful of marketplaces by hand — with one daily view that tells you what actually changed: new sellers, price movements, promo activity. So you can act, not just react.
Visibility on its own won't fix pricing or distribution. But you can't enforce what you can't see. Getting the market into focus, every day, turns out to be the step most brands are missing.