ChannelAdvisor vs. Sana Commerce Cloud

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.

Incentivized

Its suited more for B2B-focused or mid-size companies that want to have a more robust platform for their eCommerce and don't want to invest that much (like the case of Magento and other big names). If you want to make constant UX and design enhancements and tests, you'll have a couple of headaches. It's not that bad but; you wont be able to do it all without customizing and spending good money on it.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Quote Workflow--pretty simple and easy to understand and implement
• Easy-to-learn admin tools
• Very flexible/customizable initial configuration

Incentivized

• 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.

• The service could be much better. It's expensive and hard to monitor because they only check cases twice a week (if you don't have a pre-plan).
• The language and different time schedules have been an issue for tech problems. They're in Holland and Ukraine and we're in Mexico, and is really hard to find developers who know the platform to hire as an extra resource.
• You can't import SKUS to populate a landing page programmatically.

Incentivized

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.

Better control of scope between the resources on both sides involved would allow for better change management.

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!

Incentivized

Sana Commerce is not as robust, flexible (or expensive) as Magento but is better (and more expensive) than Shopify. It is well balanced and you can customize according to your clients' needs. They are constantly upgrading their platform so you can keep your eCommerce up to date, but you must consider an extra cost to adapt it to the latest version.

Incentivized

• We had zero ROI I found
• I found that 7 months into the contract we couldn't get NetSuite to connect with CA
• I believe they claimed they are fully compatible with SuiteCommerce. From what I've discovered it does not work.

• The ROI was 18% more than expected
• Our traffic has increased by 250%
• Some of our clients think our site is too complex

Incentivized