Comments on: ChannelAdvisor from a user’s point of view

By: Savvy Paul

Savvy Paul — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:16:06 +0000

Interesting to hear that CA is helping you behind the scenes. I do agree that muti-channel sales management is a critical activity for any serious business. Any tool that can contribute to such impressive growth must be worthy of investigation.

Have to say, though, that the CA checkout honestly is awful. I’ve used it twice and it caused me headaches both times by changing the shipping address when it redirected me to Paypal. And there’s absolutely no justification to put buyers through 5 screens.

If CA can get combined postage right (credit where it’s due), why are the other parts of it so bad? eBay checkout certainly is out of date – it’s crazy that ebay doesn’t have a proper shopping cart system – but I couldn’t justify paying good money for something that’s just as flawed. Even if CA is the proverbial business for the seller, I have a nagging concern in the back of my mind that it’s not the same story from the buyer’s point of view. Try searching ‘channel advisor checkout’ on the ebay forums.

I avoid sellers with CA checkout, if I possibly can.

PS Couldn’t view any of your listings at the weekend – my better half was shopping for shiny things! Frooition servers down again?

By: Bigpoppa

Bigpoppa — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:45:28 +0000

It’s all about the customer, I have not found a single account of a buyer that has said “That CA checkout process is great”

…Selling online is all about removing obstacles and for us, CA adds rather than reduces them.

There are many other ways to achieve the same results if selling via multiple venues without the huge costs, slow support (after sales) and massive learning curve.

By: jimbo

jimbo — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:31:48 +0000

Why didn’t you just go free postage, buyers like it

By: paul

paul — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:15:34 +0000

Its a steep learning curve but CA has saved me an hour a day refunding EBAY buyers who overpay postage due to the useless checkout EBAY have.

Add in an hour a day saved combining invoices and its paying for itself.

The ease of listing enabled us to create and upload 1900 skus in days rather than weeks..

Sales have increased by 40% in less than 30 days as our listings now look the business.

Its not for everyone… checkout is long (but the completion rate is better than EBAY!)… and it costs good money BUT as a solution for serious sellers it (or something similar) is a must

By: uk-vendor

uk-vendor — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:14:48 +0000

CA is a VERY good solution. We have been using it for a little over a year, managing over 1000 SKU’s on eBay and Amazon and everything works fine.
The expense is relative, if we didn’t use CA I know we would need to be paying someone to do a lot of the jobs that are automated by CA. Their salary would be more than twice the commission we pay CA.
The only gripe we have is that it can be a little over complicated in some areas and we really do need UK support which we don’t have. We can make an immediate 2 minute call to Amazon or eBay support to sort out a query. With CA we have to send an email to the States and normally wait a couple of days to get a reply and then sometimes get an answer to something we didn’t actually ask or be told to read all the details on the CA Strategy and Support Centre. Maybe someone can tell me how we can get UK support, I have never had a straight answer from the CA London office

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:00:06 +0000

There seems to be some very bitter people out there that have it in for CA, it looks like a good solution although not cheap, can anyone enlighten me why your so upset with them?

By: BigPoppa

BigPoppa — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:09:27 +0000

Well go figure, thought something was a bit odd about that post…

By: Lino

Lino — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:32:11 +0000

Congratulations to Jonny! No sooner does he say a few nice words about CA, and they’ve awarded him Retailer of the Month.

http://www.channeladvisor.co.uk/sellmore/videos/701000000009H2x.html

By: JP

JP — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 22:32:44 +0000

http://www.monsoonworks.com/uk/

I have heard good things about this company. They have a good pricing structure – different to ChannelAdvisor.

By: eg

eg — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 16:41:46 +0000

Any chance of sharing what these other solutions are?

By: Steve Antony Williams

Steve Antony Williams — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 16:40:25 +0000

Look, I do like James … But come on ….

“We fundamentally believe in our model of charging a performance-related fee”

Well of course you do, a % is nearly always more than a flat fee would be, and if it isn’t then you’ll be be doing virtually nothing for the client anyway. It’s called “milking it”.

By: Steve Antony Williams

Steve Antony Williams — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 16:38:11 +0000

CA offers nothing you can’t do for less (or even nothing) with other solutions, I manged 15+ IDs with it and so can anyone else. 1% of every transaction ? I don’t think so !

By: northumbrian

northumbrian — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 10:47:44 +0000

there can only be one reason why CA dont offer a plebs version with no % charge
and thats because they dont need to

By: Chris Dawson

Chris Dawson — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 08:49:20 +0000

Always happy to learn, tell us what you want (Bear in mind that it was you guys that asked us to speak to a real life customer and to find out what they thought was good about ChannelAdvisor as well as what they didn’t like.)

If you’ve got some suggestions for follow up questions drop them in comments and I’ll give Jonny a call and see if I can get them answered.

By: eg

eg — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:41:12 +0000

Yes that has happened to me numerous times with a channel advisor checkout, very very frustrating

By: northumbrian

northumbrian — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:16:48 +0000

a pound of flesh and the Merchant of Venice is what comes to mind

By: Bigpoppa

Bigpoppa — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:56:36 +0000

Is it just me or is something not quite right with this interview…

By: Savvy Paul

Savvy Paul — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:32:17 +0000

I bought a pair of shoes from a well known outlet on ebay last week and went through the 5 page CA checkout. When the CA checkout eventually transferred me to Paypal, the shipping address had been changed. I had to then email the outlet to check that my item could be sent to the correct address. That’s just abysmal for a company describing itself as “The leader in online channel management solutions and services”. In fact, the outlet felt compelled to send me a 5 column email on how to use the CA checkout .

The % take is ok if it is capped or if you provide a premium fixed price service that has no % take. Otherwise, the financial equation ceases to make sense once a certain level of turnover is reached.

By: northumbrian

northumbrian — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:18:00 +0000

sorry JD
your explanation concerning %.
just does not cut the mustard with us
Ebay increase value by attracting buyers by promotions and advertising, attracting foot fall, our items sell and they charge us a commission for their efforts, as far as we are aware CA is just a software tool. that stocks the shelves

By: James Scott

James Scott — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:42:32 +0000

First of all – thanks to Jonny for an honest “warts-and-all” interview. I’m all for an open dialogue and posts like this are a great catalyst for such discussions. Also, thanks to those making comments – always very interesting – in fact I wanted to respond to a couple of points to provide some clarity.

Checkout
One of the biggest misconceptions I see on these forums (and others) is that ChannelAdvisor forces our customers to use the ChannelAdvisor checkout. This is not the case.

It is actually very likely, as a buyer, you’ve bought from a seller who uses ChannelAdvisor and not even realised it! This is because our clients can choose either to use our full checkout flow, use a shortened version (using PayPal Express Checkout) or even use the eBay Checkout (with Immediate Payment). The fact that many choose to still use either the full or shortened version of our checkout usually means that they are gaining some benefit from doing so. However, it is also true that some ChannelAdvisor customers choose not to use either and instead use the eBay Checkout instead.

The point is, our customers get choice – we are flexible. Having said that, we are always looking at ways to improve the buyer experience and will continue to make improvements to our own checkout during the course of 2010.

Charging a % of sales
We fundamentally believe in our model of charging a performance-related fee. In the same way as eBay and Amazon charge a percentage on the sales that are made, so does ChannelAdvisor.

Why? Well, first it means our goals are as closely as possible aligned with the goals of our clients – to grow the top line. It also means that we only make money when our customers make sales, which in general most of our customers are very happy with. Secondly, it means that the overhead cost of our technology to our customers is variable – which means if they have a slow month and sell less (which sometimes happens when eBay make a change to the rules!), they pay us less. If they have a cracking month and make a ton of money, they pay us more – but generally don’t mind doing so!

I totally accept that this model isn’t for everyone, but I wanted to make sure everyone reading understood the reasons for us adopting this fee structure.

I’m sure there will be more comments, and if it seems appropriate I’ll jump in with some more comments – but until then, thanks to Chris and Sue and the Tamebay community for coming up with this article and I look forward to hopefully seeing some of you at Catalyst in April.

James.
MD, ChannelAdvisor UK

By: Liz

Liz — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:09:24 +0000

Urban33 – you can design the basic store almost as well as the premium store. Take a look at Buyforless, a CA case study.

By: Urban33

Urban33 — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:40:08 +0000

Had dealings with them in the past I am sure they may work for some people, but certainly not for some products, anything that needs good design to show it off for starters doesn’t work as their website’s aren’t capable of that unless you upgrade which is even more money.

I suppose I think why pay for something that doens’t work for everything?

We just employed people to do the job instead of a computer, it means you can do more and I think better.

Stu

By: Lino

Lino — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 08:52:57 +0000

That’s the main reason that scared us off a few years ago. The bigger we got, the more CA would take, even if the growth had nothing to do with them.

I also remember there being a problem coping with multiple skus on Amazon.

Like a lot of people, I’ve bought once with CA checkout, but never again.

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 00:45:29 +0000

I used to used channel advisor back when it was called Marketworks, it was OK but hads it own problems. I didn’t notice a drop in sales? in fact we were making thousands.. better if your looking to expand.

By: radams

radams — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:39:06 +0000

‘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.’

I can’t see why this is a problem, you must be able to download the sales from channel advisor, either as a csv, or via an API or screen scrape. If you couldn’t the third party solutions couldn’t work either.

Then its a simple matter of a simple shell script/batch file/mail merge to print labels and send invoices by email.