Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review [WooCommerce] does really well for simple stores that don't have a lot of products. It's really easy to set up and get products added so people can purchase them online. It's not the best for really complicated stores with products that need a lot of customization; you have to find 3rd-party plugins to add additional functionality to your store and sometimes those can create conflicts between one another.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Keeps track of product inventory, including details of product variations such as colors and sizes if required. Keeps track of orders so that the shopkeeper has one place to log in and see the status and history of orders to her shop. Creates shop-related pages automatically. Once you add one or more products, they will automatically appear on your shop home page. Additionally, pages for viewing shopping carts and for checking out are automatically created. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Because of how the Wordpress database is structured, WooCommerce isn't great for large or complex e-commerce sites. More out-of-the-box options would be nice within the base software. Because add-on plugins are developed by 3rd parties, sometimes you get conflicts that break things. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Despite very rare glitches, more connected to an excessive number of plugins, that affect the speed of the site, we are extremely satisfied with the platform, the ability to import and export products, even though we just export them, as we have our proprietary system for updating inventories. We love the ease of upgrading, enhancing, innovating, and the freedom we have to do whatever we want, which is a plus, when you consider Shopify can take down your whole store as they please, if they think you aren't abiding to their TOS or their ever changing set of rules.
Read full review Usability I gave it lots of points for being a simple product that instantly gives you a store. Very intuitive and simple for the client to update or implement. Loses LOTS of points when you want to do anything besides just sell stuff (coupons, etc) then it makes you pay big money for the add-ons and makes it difficult and time-intensive to develop your own.
Read full review Support Rating not muh support
Read full review Implementation Rating Better control of scope between the resources on both sides involved would allow for better change management.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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!
Read full review We were pretty sure we wanted a
WordPress site so that we had more control over the site itself, having been burned by third-party vendor sites before. The fact that WooCommerce integrates so well with
WordPress was a big selling point for us.
Magento would have been too heavy of a lift for our small dev team and we didn't want to rely on
Shopify or
BigCommerce (though all of those products could have their merits for other projects or clients).
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Positive: low cost to start up, and allowed us to start selling right away. Negative: better plug-ins have a high cost of entry. For example if you want to do subscriptions you need a paid plugin for it. Positive: easily integrates with PayPal and Stripe. Justin Esgar CEO/President - 360° IT Consulting, Server Management, IT Security
Read full review ScreenShots ChannelAdvisor Screenshots