ChannelAdvisor from a user’s point of view

24/02/2010 at 17:24

A few months back we were asked about ChannelAdvisor and what a ChannelAdvisor customer thought of their service – both the good points and the bad points. Jonny, from Global Technology Resource Ltd, runs a refurbishing computer business and uses ChannelAdvisor to sell on eBay as well as Amazon and has given us some insights as to how he uses ChannelAdvisor’s software.

The customer

Global Technology Resource Ltd started out as a trading group dealing with excess manufacturer product which they used to flip by selling without ever taking delivery. Once they’d found a customer the stock was shipped direct from the manufacturer but they expanded into refurbishment and selling on marketplaces. They fully clean, test and repackage computer products and have a strong green ethic of recycling everything possible including old packaging as well as making sure products are refurbished and sold where ever possible.

implementation

They initially looked at ChannelAdvisor due to growth, the number of product lines outgrew excel stock lists, launching and relisting products was unmanageable and even offering second chance offers was taking too long to achieve.

Jonny said that the initial implementation of ChannelAdvisor was a big learning curve and took weeks (months!) to fully figure out how it worked. Partly this is due to the complexity of the software and setting up sections like postage calculators didn’t always make sense until later down the implementation process when setting product weights and shipping costs on listings came into play.

Other hurdles included learning HTML to create the listing template, and more recently he’s looking at XML for the ChannelAdvisor premium store he’s signing up to.

Stock management

The result was significant growth for the company though, ChannelAdvisor allowed them to expand into new EU markets such as Germany and France and to manage one pool of stock from which listings are launched onto eBay, Amazon and Pixmania.

Jonny emphasises that they still have to monitor and manage stock though – once products are listed on a particular site if another marketplace sells out ChannelAdvisor won’t pull unsold inventory from one site and relist on another. This goes against the current eBay wisdom of listing all your inventory on one eBay listing, as the stock has to be held back with ChannelAdvisor to replenish listings on whichever eBay (or other) site sells out first.

Comparison Shopping Engines / Adwords

Jonny doesn’t consider Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE) or buying search keywords as suitable for the refurb market. From experience he ends up paying for clicks from customers looking for new products which isn’t cost effective. However he does use ChannelAdvisor to submit products to Google Product Search as it’s the only major CSE that is free to use.

Which type of business should consider ChannelAdvisor?

ChannelAdvisor isn’t the right solution for low turnover companies, and even at the Gold PowerSeller level of £6k/mth turnover it’s probably not suitable. It’s when a company grwos to £20-£30k/mth that it really justifies itself.

It’s a serious business tool but Jonny did say that due to the costs (ChannelAdvisor charge a percentage of turnover) although at the £5-6k/mth level it’s not necessarily worth the investment, that level is probably the best time to learn the software. If your company is growing fast and you’re projecting turnover to reach £15-20k/mth in the near future you should seriously consider a solution like ChannelAdvisor sooner rather than later.

Checkout

It’s well known that ChannelAdvisors checkout isn’t as slick as the standard eBay one page checkout, but Jonny has other issues as well.

He lists on multiple eBay sites from one eBay shop, and if a buyer makes a purchase in multiple currencies it’s a manual process to invoice them. It’s not possible to simply combine the postage, but to be fair that’s also a problem on eBay and not specific to ChannelAdvisor. However it’s on his wish list of issues for ChannelAdvisor to fix.

Invoices and shipping labels

I was surprised to learn that ChannelAdvisor isn’t able to print shipping labels, although there are add-on solutions such as Packing Partner from Aimco, and Metapack who can solve this. ChannelAdvisor only give the ability to print invoices so Jonny’s solution is to purchase integrated labels cut to his specification to produce both the invoice and the shipping label in one.

This isn’t an ideal solution for an online retailer, especially one with green credentials – Jonny would love to be able to simply email invoices and only print shipping labels as required.

Summary

Jonny is a pretty committed ChannelAdvisor customer, but he admits it has it’s frustrations and isn’t perfect. He does raise the changes he’d like introduced on the ChannelAdvisor forums but accepts that, for them to reach implementation, there needs to be a reasonable number of other ChannelAdvisor customers looking for the same features.

Once you start using ChannelAdvisor you’re not going to stop – according to Jonny it doesn’t make sense to switch to an alternative. He may have some complaints about what’s wrong, but changing to an alternative would involve another implementation and learning curve which just doesn’t make sense.

The biggest thing ChannelAdvisor has done for Jonny is time savings. Previously it was a round the clock operation scheduling listings to make sure he wasn’t competing with himself as items ended and making sure that second chance offers were issued as soon as possible once an auction had ended. Now all of that’s automated it’s given him the ability to expand his business as well as reducing the time taken on day to day repetitive listing and post sales tasks.

Jonny summed up his overall experience with ChannelAdvisor as “You’re dealing with what you’ve got but overall it’s a fantastic tool”. It’s enabled him to grow his business to a level that would be unthinkable if he didn’t have automation to assist him.

Disclosure: ChannelAdvisor advertise on TameBay