Lack of innovation. Behind the times.
May 03, 2014

Lack of innovation. Behind the times.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Premium Web Store

Overall Satisfaction with ChannelAdvisor

I am a web developer and I had a contract project working with ChannelAdvisor. The client had a "basic web store" and wanted to upgrade to the "premium web store" product. This company used ChannelAdvisor exclusively to earn all revenue for online apparel it sells.
  • Organized complete inventory and distributed the products to multiple websites (ebay, amazon.com, google, etc)
  • Automatically created a catalog of inventory with nice looking theme that updates quantity as items are sold
  • 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.
  • Since my client has used ChannelAdvisor from the beginning, he has been satisfied with his ROI. The fees ChannelAdvisor costs him are quite confusing because it is a monthly fee, plus a percentage of each transaction, plus the fees from Amazon, Ebay, etc. and then he has the cost of the product and the cost of shipping. My client struggled to understand bottom line ROI but that is not the fault of ChannelAdvisor. I was shocked to see the kind of revenue he was able to generate but it appeared to me to be high volumes of transaction and lots of work and fees for very little ROI.
This is the only product that I have used that does what ChannelAdvisor does. I have used Wordpress and Drupal e-commerce sites. ChannelAdvisor is very different from a typical e-commerce CMS.
Only reason I would renew is because everything is live and working on the system. If I were the company owner I would build my own e-commerce site as a stand-alone site and migrate away from ChannelAdvisor ASAP.
Shopify would be a better alternative. Why should you pay ChannelAdvisor and Shopify? I don't think ChannelAdvisor can deliver on their promise to be a complete e-commerce solution. ChannelAdvisor is best to stay focused on just distributing product on different channels (and not have your own web store at all).