Sophisticated, yet simple product management and user interface outweighs customer service issues
May 10, 2016
Sophisticated, yet simple product management and user interface outweighs customer service issues
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with ChannelAdvisor
We use ChannelAdvisor primarily for optimizing our raw inventory feeds for numerous online marketplaces, including Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Newegg, Rakuten, Sears and Shop.com. Additionally, we do the same with several digital marketing feeds like Google, Bing and Yahoo! Gemini as well as other miscellaneous flex feeds. Historically, the ChannelAdvisor platform has always fallen under the control of our acquisition marketing team (typically 2-3 people). However, several other members from Customer Service, Tech and Business Intelligence departments are also in the system from time to time. All in all, ChannelAdvisor helps simplify and expedite the product feed management process through sophisticated, yet easy-to-understand automation.
- 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.
- Customer Support: Unfortunately ChannelAdvisor does not currently provide a phone number for their support team. Everything is done strictly through email. While you can submit support tickets with "urgent" or "high priority" settings, response is almost always a little lackadaisical. It would amazing if they had a direct line to call or chat feature to make solving technical issues more efficient.
- Training/Strategy Resources: Don't get me wrong, ChannelAdvisor provides plenty of resources to educate users on its platform. It may be personal preference, but the organizational layout seems a little outdated and not as easy-to-navigate as its normal user interface.
- Optimization History Log: Battling feed errors in ChannelAdvisor tends to happen a lot. It would be great to have some sort of change history log for users to reference when optimizing feeds. In my experience, it's tough to pinpoint which changes in particular actually solved or caused an issue to occur.
- Faster Activation on New Marketplaces/Comparison Shopping Engines: With most new websites we look to expand to, I've been able to completely map our entire product feed and go "live" with our listings in under a week. It's a very quick turnaround. We've actually been able to launch three new marketplaces in the last few months.
- Increased Employee Efficiency: ChannelAdvisor removes a lot of the manual optimization typically needed to manage a product feed. This has freed up a ton of time to focus efforts elsewhere.
- GoDataFeed
Last year we looked into GoDataFeed as a result of some frustration with ChannelAdvisor's support team (plus we wanted to find some cheaper options). As much as I was looking for a reason to go with someone else, ChannelAdvisor simply holds too much of an edge when it comes to optimization and reporting features. In the end, the sophisticated, yet simple nature of ChannelAdvisor's platform outweighed less-than-ideal customer service. It also may have been the fact that we were already entirely set up and familiar with the ChannelAdvisor interface. Starting over just didn't make sense, and we really didn't have a reason to complain other than cost (which isn't terrible given our sales performance) and customer support.