Kibo eCommerce vs. Rithum

The platform has flexibility at its core and we have made full use of that capability. Even if Kibo [eCommerce] hasn't been ready to provide features and functions we need, we have the opportunity to build them ourselves. The platform started as Mozu and while it was relatively well-developed for DTC, it lacked a lot of basic B2B functionality. As a result, when we were ready to move into that arena, we built a lot for ourselves (including a multi-level account system and a tool to manage it). Keep in mind, too, that Kibo eCommerce is part of a larger suite of tools. The company has purchased a mobile Point-of-Sale system, Baynote, Certona, Monetate, and an OMS. If you need a full-scale solution, they can offer a lot. As I mentioned previously, their support and documentation need shoring up. They're not terrible, but they hinder (rather than help) when it comes to fulfilling the platform's promise of letting the customers be self-service in building out their capabilities.

Incentivized

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

• Mozu offers a flexible multi site setup where you can feed multiple sites from the same product and order database.
• Mozu allows you to create as many attributes as you would like across customer, orders, and products. This flexibility can be really powerful.

• 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

• Prebuilt Integration - There is not currently a large number of preexisting integrations, but custom integrations are fairly quick
• Time to Deploy - Don't get me wrong, We have deployed in the timeline we expected, but if you are trying to get something off the ground fast, Kibo might not be right for you. It is a robust platform that take some time to get up and running.
• Complicated Shipping - if you have a complicated shipped process, you might want to look for a tool to help, Kibo does not have very robust out of the box shipping capabilities.

• 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.

One positive note is that I have always been able to get someone on the phone in support whenever I have called, even at 1 AM. Getting someone on the phone is only half the battle though. In the first few months of using Mozu it often seemed that support didn’t know anymore about Mozu than we did. This has slowly started to change, but as a daily user you are likely to be on par with support in terms of knowing what to do when you encounter a problem. The support phone number is really most useful for having them put in a support ticket for you rather than typing it all out yourself and emailing it. It is very rare that the support reps are actually empowered to solve the problem at hand. Unless the issue you are having is user error, they will just take your information and pass it on the proper department. Your request or problem will then be ignored for months on end. Some day, it might actually get fixed but you are unlikely to be notified that this has happened. Most of these issues are assigned an internal ID that they use for tracking. Support is more than happy to pass this ID along, but it is useless. There is no way to actually see where the issue lies in the endless queue of similar issues.

At the time of our implementation Mozu did not have any processes or procedures set up around going live. We basically were forced to just wing it and hope for the best

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

We had a custom, in-house ecommerce website before moving to Kibo. It was brittle, slow, and wasn't going to scale nearly well enough or fast enough to keep up with our requirements

Incentivized

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

• Kibo has always delivered rapid & exceptional support to our organization
• Kibo has been cost-competitive when considering other vendors
• The platform continues to add value without requiring substantial additional investments

• This is an expensive tool that takes time to implement properly. You have to be ready to absorb costs and in downtime not selling.
• Once set up well, it has some advantages that help with sale increases and fewer headaches.
• We now use the same amount of people but have absorbed about 25% more business coming in.

Incentivized