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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Squarespace
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Squarespace is a CMS platform that allows users to create a DIY blog, eCommerce store, and/or portfolio (visual art or music). Some Squarespace website and shop templates are industry or use case-specific, such as menu builders for restaurant sites.
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.
I have a gorgeous website that I made myself, thanks to Squarespace. I'm able to integrate marketing emails, SEO, analytics, online carts, pretty much instantly. If you want to get started fast, it's really great. I think if you want to customize square space and you're having trouble, it would be most helpful to hire a square space designer. That's what I would have done in retrospect.
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.
Stupid simple to use. I know very creative people who cannot code and this is probably the easiest ever platform for them!
Pretty website templates and great functionality with showing off portfolios.
They've already figured out what are the problems that non-coding people have when creating websites and they've figured out a simple solution for all of it.
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.
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.
It's simple to use for someone who is really good with computers as well as those who are not. I've been using my personal squarespace for years and have also helped clients build a starting page which they are later able to manage theirselves.
Help is available directly from the back end and uses full sentence searching to find answers to questions others may have asked before. With a ton of articles and support questions documents, it is very likely that your question has been answered. If not each page has the ability to open a direct email to support. Each case has a number and can be followed. Responses are often quick and have links and directions clearly stated
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!
Overall, as a designer, it makes perfect sense for small to large businesses to use a site such as SquareSpace. Costs are relatively reasonable with the ability to go in and do custom code.
The issue is certain aspects of it, depending on the plan, you can't do. So, if you want to do API to the site, you need to use the top-tier program to do so. Even at custom code, you won't have access to the API section.
As well, like all templates and themes, everybody is using the same style too.
The key positive impact on my overall business objectives is how simple Squarespace sites are to implement new information. Whenever our services change, we can quickly update pages or even change how the website flows, in a very short window of time. This allows me to get back to more urgent work sooner.
Our Squarespace site for Club Swim Show helped present our web series to potential partners; Club Swim Show went on to partner with a popular swimming magazine and reach a larger audience through that magazine's hosting thanks to the professional design of our original website.
Squarespace does not bring in customers to my storefront, which is fine for me, since I sell things infrequently and it is not my main business, but might work against someone who is expecting a Shopify or Etsy level connection with buyer markets.
