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.
N/A
TrueCommerce
Score 5.2 out of 10
N/A
Truecommerce EDI software is supported by a global commerce network that is used to connect with 160,000+ retailers. Headquartered in Cranberry Township, PA, the TrueCommerce Trading Partner EDI Platform is designed to offer an end-to-end solution for EDI compliance and integration.
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.
If you want to sell online and need a platform, you should select Nexternal. If it is within your budget and you want to have success, Nexternal is the way to go. Since switching to Nexternal from Kreck, our online sales have more than tripled!
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.
Nexternal is hosted solution which means much of the source code is protected and inaccessible. For clients looking to fully customize the user experience, there are some limitations, with any hosted solution, that must be considered.
Nexternal doesn't have a built in wish list feature. They did partner with a 3rd party vendor, and now offer the base functionality; however, for clients whose needs center on the capabilities of a wish list, this feature must be closely considered.
Nexternal's monthly fees are structured in such a way that they scale based on sales. This can be an affordable set up for a majority, but a deterrent for others. That said, the phrase 'you get what you pay for' rings true for ecommerce platforms as well. As I've mentioned perhaps too many times already, the level of reliable support combined with the user-friendly, secure platform are worth it.
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.
I love the control and attention to detail that this system has. Don't be intimidated by it. Keep playing with it, ask questions, and get to know the program. You will grow to absolutely love and understand it.
We've worked with ecommerce providers for over 12 years, and we have yet to find another solution that provides the same level of responsiveness and accessibility as Nexternal's account representatives.
I had help from start to finish. Doreen, my rep, was very patient, concise, clear, and she has always had the answers I need. Setting up your store is time consuming at first, but with the support system that Nexternal offers, it is painless.
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!
When we started with Nexternal, there were not as many options as there are today. We felt the platform was one that we could work with and had a great customer support contact that helped us during the creation of our site.
