ChannelAdvisor is a provider of cloud-based e-commerce solutions that enable retailers and manufacturers to integrate, manage and optimize their merchandise sales across hundreds of online channels including Amazon, Google, eBay, Facebook and more.
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KalioCommerce
Score 7.4 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
KalioCommerce is an enterprise eCommerce platform that powers Internet Retailer Top 1000 B2C & B2B brands. According to the vendor, online retailers get the flexibility to build uniquely branded sites with sophisticated business needs, and transform ideas into revenue faster with the platform’s data-driven administration console and cloud architecture. Key customers include Discount Ramps, Hale Groves, AllHeart Medical Supplies, Touch of Class, Arthur Beren Shoes,…
Excellent for marketplace sellers with a lot of products - or those with a high turnover of SKUs. Not well suited to the small seller with only a few SKUs to promote. Also probably not suited to someone who only cares about a single marketplace. The real strength of it comes from managing multiple marketplaces through a single system.
KalioCommerce is a good choice for mid market companies. IT support required would depend on your particular implementation, of course, but in our case our ecommerce team working with Kalio is able to deal with 95% of the work
Complex, Yet Simple Navigational Interface: ChannelAdvisor is a beast, but navigating through their platform is relatively straightforward. The overall heirarchy is very well put together.
One Feed to Rule Them All: With ChannelAdvisor, all we have to do is connect our inventory to their system once. Instead of having to construct and connect dozens of different product feeds to our internal inventory system, we simply connect to ChannelAdvisor and use the same single feed to build out all others' website templates.
Product Mapping Made Easy: Mapping product attribute data across a multitude of unique online marketplaces and digital marketing sites can seem like a daunting task. ChannelAdvisor does a great job of simplifying this process, providing easy-to-understand and manage feed templates containing helpful descriptions and categorization.
Business Rules and Lookup Lists: I use these all the time when "transforming" our raw inventory data to the specifications of any given feed. They are extremely helpful and super easy to build.
Efficient Product Optimization: Instead of having to deal with the time-consuming task of making minute changes to thousands and thousands of skus, ChannelAdvisor allows you to automate these changes in a matter of minutes. It's much more scalable for our business.
Lack of customization, documentation, tutorials, support for the premium webstore
Lack of innovation. My client was told that the basic web store was being replace by the premium web store so they needed to upgrade. In my opinion the basic web store was actually much more flexible and robust than the premium web store. Now (it has been less than 2 years) they are making my client switch from the premium web store to "Shopify" and they are charging more money for this. My client was charged to upgrade each time and the process to upgrade was expensive, time consuming, and very convoluted. ChannelAdvisor needs to invest in their technology and migrate data for ChannelAdvisor changes technology. But the experience as an end user is very frustrating since the way of doing things keep changing and not always for the better result for the customer.
Channel Advisor needs better support. Help Desk, knowledge base, etc. there are a lot of things you can do with ChannelAdvisor but it is my experience that nothing is very straight forward and there are many different potential problems you will run into and ChannelAdvisor points the finger at "Google" or "Amazon" or "Ebay" instead of helping solve a problem from end to end.
It is quite expensive for what it does. I would not have advised my customer to use their product but they were so entrenched that they had no other choice.
Because Kalio has a growing client base, I find them a bit understaffed. The speed at which our company was growing, we needed to lean on them more, but they weren't always able to deliver because of the sheer volume of requests compared to their staff.
It's difficult to physically write code within the space they have provided. I find that I have to copy and paste the code into a different text editor to read it better.
Without ChannelAdvisor, our business wouldn't be where it is today so the idea of NOT renewing is out of the question. By not renewing we would have to hire more employees and have more of a workload for existing employees. By keeping costs low and employees effecient we have been able to grow exponentially.
KalioCommerce is not simply a software solution, it's an entire organization focused on helping our business grow and improve. They are an extension of my eCommerce team, and their insights and support help us move quicker in an ever changing field. That, in combination with a platform that has proven to be flexible, dependable and intuitive makes renewing a no-brainer.
Our brand is growing online at a rapid clip, and we wanted a platform that would scale accordingly. The feature that really sold us was the automatic workflows. If we want a certain type of product that's going to a customer in a certain state to ship a certain way, we could make that happen automatically without any human touch! Wow!
Having used Magento and Joomla in the past to manage websites, the KalioCommerce platform allows access to much deeper levels of the platform to better customize it for our needs. In addition, the platform is much more robust, able to handle complex, huge product catalogs, and is more flexible in terms of integration with other tools and services.
