ChannelAdvisor Corporation

Channel Advisor Review Channel Advisor agreed to managing marketplaces and our data, then blamed us when mistakes were made. In seven months, our ROI with Channel Advisor has been -98%, while our brick and mortar store has grown by 4% during the same period. We made it clear on multiple occasions before and after signing the contract that we didn’t want to do the work because we have a small staff which is why we were interested in managed marketplaces. Channel Advisor told us it wouldn’t be a problem, so we signed up and prepaid our managed marketplaces contract with Channel Advisor. Channel Advisor’s sales and marketing information for managed marketplaces states: • Manage the marketplaces for you. • You provide the data and Channel Advisor managing the data. • You provide pricing guidance, and Channel Advisor takes the data you provide and list the products on the marketplace. • You approve the ideas and plan we have for your account and Channel Advisor makes sure they are formatted in the best way to get sales. • You do the customer service and Channel Advisor manages the day to day of selling on the marketplace including errors resolution, monitoring seller metrics, conducting competitor analysis, managing promotions, looking for new opportunities etc. • There will be three people working on your account, Account manager, Client Strategy Manager, and Client Services Associate. What we have experienced is: • Channel Advisor has made several mistakes managing the data costing us five figures because of incorrect pricing and legal fees not to mention damaging our seller reputation. This happened in under 15 minutes of taking our Amazon store out of vacation mode, thankfully we caught it, or we could have been out a lot more. • Channel Advisor has made mistakes on pricing even though we provided pricing formulas to them, causing the listing of items way below our cost. • Channel Advisor provided and listed products on Amazon, even though many items did not match the Amazon ASIN data. They didn’t even recommend not listing the not matching products. • We approved the plans, yet the sales are still just a fraction of our expenses. • Channel Advisor has not conducted competitor analysis or looked for new opportunities. • If there are three people working on our account, we have not seen the results of it and have primary communications with one person. The mistakes made by Channel Advisor have cost us a lot and we feel we would be doing a disservice to anyone looking at Channel Advisor if we didn’t share our experience.

Don't make yourself look bad by recommending your company goes into a contract with ChannelAdvisor. The service isn't worth what they charge for it by a long shot. Would you believe they charge over $1k/mo + % of your sales but only give email support? The system/service level isn't worth it. We've been at it for 5 months and are still struggling to bing channels up. The process is slow and painful. When a channel is first brought up there are lots of errors. For almost each error we had to contact their support. We open a case and wait for the next day for their answer. Then we have to make the changes to our input file and wait for the changes to take effect. Then either the same error happens again and another 48 hours is wasted or the next error comes up and a new 48 to 72 hours later we are ready to solve the next error. We have been opening an average of 15 support cases per week for 4 channels. We basically have to devote one person to take care of the system. That person could cover more channels if the work was done manually with each channel. This system is not worth the money charged for it, not even half or a quarter. In order to be worth it, ChannelAdvisor would have to offer free channel setup (meaning they setup each channel desired by the client at no cost), no charge until each channel is up and free phone support. We basically spent $1500 in training, over $1k per month for 5 months (they had us pay for a year service in one shot), 1 person off our staff (yes 5 months practically full time working on that project) and have nothing to show for. To top it all, we contacted our rep (a few times by email and phone) to request 3 months credit since we feel that is only fair, he never got back to us...