ChannelAdvisor Reviews

BlueBoard = Love

Comments: Overall, I've had nothing but an awesome experience with BB, it's made my morning so much easier and more reliable and I've gotten so many new people at our company using it now, thanks to the CES visit we had from you this year. Thank you all, so much!

Pros:

BlueBoard has not only changed the way I monitor MAP pricing online, but has also reinvented the way our Marketing Team can see product reviews from customers and allows our sales guys to see whether product are well stocked enough. It's amazing!

Cons:

There are quite a few updates that happen, which is great, but I wish that there was a pop-up mini tutorial each time something changed to show me how to manage my page the new way. For example, I spoke with customer rep. this morning (he's the best!) and had to ask him where to find a group of filtered products I had set up because the filter aspect of BB had changed.

Powerful software but Expensive and hard to learn

Comments: The software is built with a long term vision but they should make it more affordable by offering it at a lower price to more customers. They also need to provide more guidance in the best way to implement the software

Pros:

Very customizable, has a beautiful interface, and is built with powerful features including rules, look up lists, limitless product attributes, data mapping, and more. Also has great features for each marketplace, including Amazon Advertising with automatic bidding and rules, repricing, a price gird which shows your price and competitors offer and your sales history which is great for monitoring your competitors in one dashboard

Cons:

TONS of setup work. I spent almost a year setting up all the different features and rules for my business. Zero guidance is provided on best way to setup your system. support is slow, sometimes taking 3 days to respond to a ticket. help pages are not detailed. product is way more expensive then cheaper alternatives such as Ecomdash. They dont have an easy way to integrate with quickbooks or other accounting software, SellerCloud does.

Awful customer service for the over priced charge

Comments: Being able to manage large amounts of inventory on one system across several third party sales platform.

Pros:

Great software for third party selling like eBay, Amazon and etc. Basically a one stop shop for large inventory management on multiple platforms.

Cons:

It is highly overpriced which could have been overlooked because the platform helps manage your inventory and allows you to sell a lot of products. The customer service was awful and can only be reached by email. The usual response time was 48 to 72 hours. Your contact person only lasts a month or two and your left hanging with a new person every few months. They upgraded and removed a key feature that we used and when we addressed it, nobody contacted us back. In the end, we warned them that we were going to leave and nobody cared. It took them over a year with a cold call sales person to ask why we left and if we would like to come back. The software exchanged nearly killed the company and the salesperson didn't understand the explanation why we wouldn't come back and reach out again a month later.

ChannelAdvisor is a wonderful choice for multi channel sales

Comments: Overall ChannelAdvisor has been a game changer for the positive. Because it is highly customizable, I can do lots of things that would have been far more tedious or impossible in other similar systems.

Pros:

We converted from an old system to ChannelAdvisor a few years ago. Biggest benefit was the power it had to allow many options selling in multiple online marketplaces. One of the best features is to bring in data feeds from various places and map them the way I want them.

Cons:

Many of the routine tasks such as receiving inventory and updating inventory counts are tedious. We've built other tools that integrate with ChannelAdvisor that are more efficient.

Seems like a great product but project support is abysmal

Comments: The tool seems great and works well once properly configured. Lots of room to grow the business on to new platforms easily once properly configured, You will still need a lot of focus on the process and business logic required to create your initial feed, particularly where it comes to product pricing.

Pros:

It allows us to get onboarded onto multiple market places easily with a single data feed and powerful rules engine. We can grow into solution as well.

Cons:

The project and onboarding support has been dreadful. You are on your own. But that might be for the best as most of the good staff seem overworked and the rest don't seem to care. Make no effort to understand you business and ensure the tool is properly configured so you might as well just take the basic onboarding package and do it all yourself.

Think twice before using ChannelAdvisor

Comments: Once you get through the onboarding and support issues the software runs great. The cost starts to drain you after a few months, and you start to question yourself for getting into a 2-year contract. When my contact finally ended, I was paying over $2K a month. When my contract was up, they really didn't want to renegotiate. They just wanted to sign me up for another two years. It seems like the business model is to sign you up for two years and get as much out of you as they can with onboarding cost, monthly fees, and 2-3% of your revenue. ChennalAdvisor is a public company and to continue to show strong margins they just as well have you leave and bring on another newbie.

Pros:

There is no doubt that ChannelAdvisor has some of the best software on the market which makes it very tempting. The software has a ton of functionality (Most you'll never use). It supports a lot of marketplaces and the mapping for those marketplaces is great. Built in Auto Pricer and a lot of other features.

Cons:

Cost!!! Contracts!!! No Support!!! No phone support. Waiting days for email support. No help with onboarding unless you pay thousands They lock you in with a Long Contract I really don’t feel comfortable with and can't get out of. Crazy High monthly fees. When your revenue gets to a predetermined amount, they start to take a percentage of revenue on top of the monthly fees. The software is really complicated and most of the time it requires some level of support that's nonexistent. You may have to wait days to get a question answered and most of the time they will just send you to a help page link.

Simple, Yet Robust Marketplace Product & Listing Management

Comments: Mostly good experience working with CA. Their technical team is typically very responsive to support questions, but the development of new features to keep up with the marketplace channel could be improved.

Pros:

Ability to customize product attributes to fit business needs and create custom, logic-based business rules to transform product information to the marketplace.

Cons:

Listing revisions at times cause issues on the marketplace channel and lacks the full suite of features available native to that marketplace.

Good software but not the best company

Comments: All in all it is good software but not the best company to work with.

Pros:

CA is probably the best solution in the marketplace for sellers wanting to offer goods on multiple marketplaces. The software is comprehensive and relatively easy to learn and use. It is also stable with few day-to-day problems.

Cons:

It is also the most expensive solution out there (by far) and they require a one year contract. In addition, they are not easy to break away from when the contract expires. They continued to charge us even after our contract expired and forced us to go through our bank and credit card company to recover the extra charges. We also found them very inflexible. You pretty much have to accept it is their way or the highway.

Great for many stores

Pros:

I liked how I could access all my stores on different platforms all in one window. It helped greatly when dealing with customers and made it very helpful for our customer service to handle orders accordingly back to the store especially for all the back-end stuff like editing orders and refunds. Made listings with platforms fairly quickly and then to each parent-child groups of SKUs.

Cons:

Very complicated to use at first. Requires a lot of training to find out all the features.

ChannelAdvisor Enterprise

Comments: Very short period of time due to cost.

Pros:

Loved all the abilities channel advisor gives on multiple channel functionality. Frees up time for me to do more.

Cons:

The cost is incredibly high, kept trying to get it lower and was told that they couldn't/wouldn't. Can get the same service for cheaper with other companies.

The Best platform for setting up your online marketplace business

Comments: I have shopped all around time and again to see what other competitors are coming up but I fail every time to learn anything new. Channel Advisor is so far the best in the industry and it always is top in its game.. be it simplifying new updates which may be daunting, keeping up with industry trends, adding features, extremely talented customer support and of course a very solid platform. I believe that they are the best in the industry and offer great value and service.

Pros:

The platform is more easy to understand, solid and simple compared to its competition. Their customer support is extremely talented.

Cons:

The only thing I would say is pricing. I wish I could get a better pricing based on a lower tier.. maybe they should encourage sellers who are starting out and give them a basic platform to Manage Inventory and Orders only.

Logical Software that works well, but can be complex depending on your original data.

Comments: We use the software to pull data together from a range of sources since our systems are spread across multiple data points. This makes it more complex, but the software works in a logical manner. We don't use it for order management or stock, rather just as a system to transform and feed data to various marketplaces, and send orders back into our system. I took over a badly set up system and it has taken a year to sort the bad data from the good, and fully work through all of the issues from previous users at my company - the general consensus was that everyone hated CA because they didnt understand it. I actually find CA a logical and easy to use system. It has a lot of functionality and ability to be customised, and we have been able to automate a significant amount of our data flow and pricing strategies making us more effient.

Pros:

Logical, plenty of Customization, helps with automation and efficiencies. I really like Channel Advisor , however it can become quite complex. When you understand the goal, and the software capabilities it is a great system and helps pull together and transform complex data, customizing it for each marketplace.

Cons:

Once set up it can be hard to backtrack and redo the system, especially once its in operation. Important to get the data in the right way the first time. It's a tough program to hire for - it sits between IT, Data, and Marketing Content to some extent.

If you sell on more than one marketplace, you need this software

Comments: We needed to solve a labor issue of trying to post a product/SKU on multiple different marketplaces without having to go to each one and use their particular interfaces.
Channel Advisor simplifies all of that, and allows us to mainstream our postings from a central repository.
Also, CA manages inventory across all channels, so you don't run the risk of overselling. Built in repricing tools let you automatically adjust your pricing to match marketplace trends and win the sale within your guidelines. Business rules let you be as complex as you want in defining those guidelines. Overall, this is an extremely robust (and scale-able) system that allows you to customize and manage listings, pricing, inventory and more from one place.

Pros:

Incredible versatility, allowing us to list a large catalog of products across multiple marketplaces with minimal effort. Centralized and customizable product data management allows for maximum exposure with minimum labor. CA keeps up with all the latest requirements and mapping changes from each marketplace, so you don't have to.

Cons:

My only con for this software isn't the software itself - it's the support. Support requests can take a long time to get addressed/resolved. Almost all have to be escalated, which takes days if not weeks.

The only marketplace listing management tool I'd recommend

Comments: I have used ChannelAdvisor for years, and have had very few negative experiences. The support staff are generally very quick to respond, and helpful in resolving support cases. There are various ways the platform enables users to solve problems on their own; such as creating a customized FTP feeds and scheduling automated tasks. I've used two of the competitor's platforms, and neither come close to the flexibility and intuitive use of ChannelAdvisor.

Pros:

The product listing templates are very versatile. You can create unique rules to manage all products, a group of products, or even a single product. This allows us to easily manage many different types of product's data, and configure exactly the way we want.

Cons:

When your product catalog is small, ChannelAdvisor's inventory management tools run very quickly. When your catalog is hundreds of thousands of products, the response times can be painfully slow in some situations.

They just want to get your sale and lock you into a contract.

Comments: We moved from a different feed platform to ChannelAdvisor after believing that we could connect more of our platforms to ChannelAdvisor because of their open API, generate more sales by leveraging their competitive landscape tools, and overall have a greater level of customer support (since they are among the top in their industry). What we found was that it's often a ghost town when it comes getting the support you need, it's not easy to figure out solutions yourself (making you travel to ghost town for support), and if you try and cancel your contract, they give you the run-around for weeks and weeks.

Pros:

There's a lot of good features that they offer in terms of monitoring the buy box, tracking orders, getting an overall picture of your competitiveness and account health, but perhaps not much more beyond what you can already get in the marketplace dashboard if you know where to look.

Cons:

Their support team lacks any motivation whatsoever, their sales team will promise you the world without actually giving it to you, and it's definitely not the most user-friendly platform or interface if you're not willing or able to spend a good amount of time exploring the platform.

Cancellation Nightmare

Comments: Our company went out of business after using CA for 11 years. Our contract auto renews every year unless we cancel it. The billing date is in December, but apparently the renewal date was 30 days earlier in November. After so many years, all I knew about was the billing date. I didn't even know the renewal date was 30 days prior. Anyway, I thought I canceled in plenty of time before the billing date, but apparently it was only 3 days before the contract renewal date. They wanted 30 days notice before the renewal date. So now they want to put me on the hook for an entire additional year at $10k for services that I have not used in months before my cancellation notice. And I still have not used it nor intend to use it because our business is closed down. I don't understand their need to bill me for 1 year in the future for a service that won't be used. Now our account has been sent to collections. Horrible company to do business with. It's completely unethical what they're doing. Fashion Bloom / Baby Town

Pros:

It was simple and relatively easy to use

Cons:

They have old-school sales and retention tactics. Try to get you on the hook and bind you legally to their contract from every angle. When it's time to get out, it's very difficult. I thought I canceled in time, but apparently not, and now they sent me to collections for an entire year of service IN THE FUTURE that I don't intend to use.

In seven months, our ROI with Channel Advisor has been -98%.

Comments: Channel Advisor agreed to managing marketplaces and our data, then blamed us when mistakes were made. In seven months, our ROI with Channel Advisor has been -98%, while our brick and mortar store has grown by 4% during the same period. We made it clear on multiple occasions before and after signing the contract that we didn’t want to do the work because we have a small staff which is why we were interested in managed marketplaces. Channel Advisor told us it wouldn’t be a problem, so we signed up and prepaid our managed marketplaces contract with Channel Advisor. Channel Advisor’s sales and marketing information for managed marketplaces states:
• Manage the marketplaces for you.
• You provide the data and Channel Advisor managing the data.
• You provide pricing guidance, and Channel Advisor takes the data you provide and list the products on the marketplace.
• You approve the ideas and plan we have for your account and Channel Advisor makes sure they are formatted in the best way to get sales.
• You do the customer service and Channel Advisor manages the day to day of selling on the marketplace including errors resolution, monitoring seller metrics, conducting competitor analysis, managing promotions, looking for new opportunities etc.
• There will be three people working on your account, Account manager, Client Strategy Manager, and Client Services Associate. What we have experienced is:
• Channel Advisor has made several mistakes managing the data costing us five

Pros:

They integrate into a lot of marketplaces. They integrate into our largest suppliers. They provided us some good 3rd party resources.

Cons:

They don't really manage your data. They don't provide recommendations if there are challenges with a marketplace. They don't take responsibility for their mistakes.

Thorough Software for Complex Requirements, Future Solutions Up & Coming

Pros:

You can nearly complete anything you want to within Channel Advisor, the user interface is a bit complex and likely overwhelming for new users. The ability to manipulate data to different markets through business rules and templates is incredibly useful, but requires a lot of back end mapping and fairly continuous work as marketplaces change requirements or add new attributes

Cons:

After reviewing additional up and coming comparable software systems: Channel Advisor's user interface and ease-of-use is near the bottom, overall you can expect to pay 2-3x the cost of comparable solutions - if you absolutely need the ability to do utterly anything when manipulating data, sending feeds, etc you may need Channel Advisor

Great tool to automate processes

Comments: The application offers a lot of functionalities and offer features to automate various processes. We have about 1M+ listings across multiple channels, and no issues in terms of handling the load.

Pros:

The portal is user friendly and have a lot of functionalities that can definitely save time and money. Shared inventory across the multiple channels comes really handy, find articles within documentation is super easy, support is knowledgeable in most cases.

Cons:

The auto detection of categories on the third party channels needs a lot improvements. The category and subcategory valid values information provided lack details or not there. Also the lack of video tutorials.

Essential for our multi-brand business

Pros:

We represent multiple brands and channel advisor has allowed us to manage multiple brands across multiple online marketplaces. It has been so nice to have one central place to make changes that are pushed out to different marketplaces. I didn't think we would use the repricer feature much but I love it. We are now managing all of our advertising on Channel Advisor. It's nice to have one central place for all of this.

Cons:

The software is robust and complicated at times. It would be nice to have phone support. Their email support can take a day or two.

Good solid system

Comments: Very god experience and they help a lot. System was good and worked well and in some ways a lot easier than other systems. however they are expensive and do require a lot of investment to get features that come as standard with our similar systems

Pros:

A good solid system that links with a lot of online marketplaces

Cons:

The layout and feel of the system was not so user friendly and had to purchase lots of features/plugins that come as standard with our similar systems

What you need to know!

Comments: I first started using ChannelAdvisor because i was told that it would seamlessly let me keep selling my products on four or more platforms. While it may have been doable, it definitely won't be seamless.

Pros:

The concept behind this software is amazing. Living in a consumer world, many people want to sell their products on multiple channels

Cons:

Connecting API feeds was a nightmare with ChannelAdvisor. This could be both the fault of ChannelAdvisor and the platform, but it made it a night mare for use. We were a growing company and continually wanted to expand to new platforms to sell, while Channel Advisor helped us create one listing and having them in all places, it was too much heartache to handle setting it up.

Make my life easier

Comments: Overall very good. I got all supports I need when problems arise. Will appreciate if more training/webinars can be provided for advanced features.

Pros:

Channel Advisor is our most important tool for online business. Easy to use, lots of functions and features, customized reports that help me analyze our business.

Cons:

There are some data I need but not downloadable - such as ebay Deals & Promotions sales details.

Excellent Multi Channel Management Tool

Pros:

We currently use Channel Advisor to manage about 5,000 skus across eBay, Amazon, TradeMe, and Mercado Libre accounts. CA saves us tons of time and I'm not quite sure what we'd do without it. My favorite feature of ChannelAdvisor is definitely the Amazon Repricer tool, which allows you to stay competitive on Amazon based on pre set parameters! Keep in mind CA would not not be the ideal tool for small companies or startups.

Cons:

We did have issues with the Shopify API to the point where we decided to move to a different platform for Shopify. This was is mid 2016 however, and things may be better now.

Helpful software

Comments: Listing publication
Order management
Customer service support

Pros:

Ease of use Enables us to open on more new marketplaces easily (actually made some intros for us)

Cons:

Cost is high Sometimes not as responsive on the service side / issue resolution Doesn't always support all new features on marketplaces (besides Amazon), especially if they are optional