ChannelAdvisor (NYSE: ECOM) is a leading e-commerce cloud platform whose mission is to connect and optimize the world’s commerce. For two decades, ChannelAdvisor has helped brands and retailers worldwide improve their online performance by expanding sales channels, connecting with consumers, optimizing their operations for peak performance, and providing actionable analytics to improve competitiveness. Thousands of customers depend on ChannelAdvisor to securely power their sales and optimize fulfillment on channels such as Amazon, eBay, Google, Facebook, Zalando, Walmart, and hundreds more. For more information, visit www.channeladvisor.com.
Please do not ignore this or any of the other negative reviews you may have read regarding Channel Advisor, as that’s precisely the mistake we made. Before signing up, we received regular phone calls explaining the benefits of Channel Advisors Software. Due to online reviews, we were sceptical and didn’t make any commitments. However, after being told that they would do “most of the legwork” and promised access to eBay Deals (a massive opportunity for any eBay seller) we signed up. As soon as payment was made, communication with Channel Advisor practically ceased. No more phone calls were received and there was tremendous difficulty getting through to someone who could fulfil the promises made. With eBay deals looking unlikely, we still endured to see the benefits of a unified system. Many hours were spent by staff, altering our current inventory to match their requirements. After the software went “live”, it resulted in the loss of all shipping information and more importantly the deletion of every items description on over 10,000 products. To put the importance of this into perspective, a study conducted by Amazon states that 34% of consumers felt that the description was a key factor in purchase decisions. Sales were directly influenced, as sales dropped by over 55% in a matter of days. Not to mention the man hours that will need to be invested into rectifying this issue The fact that these issues arose is only half of the problem with Channel Advisor. Problems can be solved, but channel advisor will not be the ones trying to help you. To top everything off, for a web based system their servers are slow and listing procedures illogical. My advice to anyone would be to avoid this company at all costs. Save yourself the hassle, time and money as it’s simply not worth it.
We paid £1500 + VAT to launch with them on just eBay then £1000 + VAT per month subscription. The setup was ok, as we are familiar with inventory systems. But when it came to despatch - we were told the system couldn't do it and had use a third party system costing an additional £500 per month. Was then told launching with Amazon would be an additional cost, scraping the data is an additional cost, as is launching on any other marketplace. I feel robbed. They guaranteed a double in sales/turnover per month - instead, we saw sales plummet rapidly. We are now two months in and fighting for a full refund. Not a single order processed via them yet. Usual story of a company promising to deliver everything but failing fast. Back to Linnwork for now (our existing platform). UPDATE. A month later after several called and emails they finally authorised a full refund. So an extra star for that now.
This is my full honest review of Channel Advisor. I can see many people have had good reviews and i sincerely hope no one has to go through what we went through. We had the eBay and Amazon launch with them which cost us over £4,000. So please bare in min that this was an additional payment for them to do this. Here are the issues we had with Amazon: *Wrong images for the items for sale on Amazon. *Wrong description and parts of the description missing. *items merged in with other items making it very confusing for customers as they uploaded incorrect MPN's. *Amazon then suspended our account because of these errors. *Lost us over £30,000 within 2 months because of these errors on Amazon alone. *Made Channel Advisor live even though they knew of these errors but did this over the weekend when their offices where closed so could not report the errors. *wrong variations for at least 10% of our listed items. *Told them and still did nothing about it Issues with eBay: *eBay recently made it so all items had to have an MPN or state this does not apply in your listing, when we added the MPN's it was hit and miss with the update and ended up with multiple items getting removed. *Wrong images uploaded. *Missing descriptions. *Doesn't sync properly. *Items don't always spool into Channel Advisor. *Lost eBay top rated within 3 months of them and dropped below standard resulting in us losing £15,000 a month Overall our experience with Channel Advisor was rushed, not enough care during the set up process and the training is horrendous. If you are thinking about joining up with Channel Advisor please have a serious chat with them to ensure every detail is taken care of. The only good thing we found from channel advisor is marking items off as dispatched... that is literally it. They charged us over £700 a month for their services and to top it off you are stuck in a 12 month contract with guarantees of this actually benefitting you in anyway. We were told by the sales advisor that after 12 months it continues as a month rolling contract... this is not the case. Oh and they increase the monthly payment after the first year without informing you. £8400 plus VAT per year,,, you could employ someone part time for that fee and that doesn't include the VAT. So all in all they nearly sent out company under.... an expensive learning curve for us but we have learnt our lesson that you should not rely on other companies to exploit and take advantage of hard working people...absolute rip off. All in all over £100,000 lost in several months.
Dear Reader Thank you for reading my review. I used CA for managed digital marketing, it was the worse experience i have ever had in my working life. A sales rep gave us the sales talk and promised us so much. As sceptical as i was they convinced me to sign up. I can honestly say they are the laziest agency i have ever worked with. If you have little knowledge in adwords they will milk you for every penny you have. I was lucky enough to know that they were trying to make a fool out of us. They are still trying to pursue me but i will take it to court and use phone calls, emails and reports to prove how negligent they have been. Avoid at all cost! It's worse than making a deal with the devil! I had revoked their access from adwords and they never had a clue until i mentioned it to them. The majority of the time the people dealing with my account were too busy holidaying! Ash
Money talks? Not for this company? You gave them the big upfront money and when you realized they did poor job and could like to cancel the contract you ended up a collection notice for the balance of the one year contract not mentioning the mistakes they made and the loss we have got.. Terrible and so sad...
If you are looking for cheap, simple or basic, you are in the wrong place. If you are looking for an advanced, flexible system that constantly updates and upgrades and will allow you to drive your own business forward then you are in the right place. We have been delighted with the results so far and continue to be pleased with the input from the various staff members that we work with.
The rep seemed honest and up front about their Company. He also gave me the impression that if you buy the full package, you get full help. Almost like they will do everything for you. They do all the work and we just review. That was hardly the case. Their team was out of town the first couple of weeks to attend some event so we lost a few weeks. We finally got the ball rolling and they asked us to practically do everything for them. I was like why did I buy the premium package for. There were so many things they promised they could do but when it came down to it, they couldn't do it. We wanted to break the contract because they didn't fulfill their end of the bargain and they sent my account to collections. I told them I don't mind paying what they're asking if they fulfilled their end of the bargain. They wouldn't budge or re-negotiate the contract. They were so big they felt were like who Cares. I do not recommend them!! Whatever you do, don't sign up with them. Look at all of their reviews and BBB reviews. Not one of them say great things about them
I am glad we chose ChannelAdvisor to manage our Ebay Amazon & Webstore inventory and sales. I use it to process orders in conjuction with packing partner and find it superb. The team are proactive and keen to see us develop and grow. Go for it! Paul
As others have stated, we started on good faith. They were very expensive but we figured it would pay to go with the "big" company in the space. Well let me tell you, that was a BIG mistake! First off, what company charges you thousands a month and doesn't offer phone or chat support??!?! If you send an email, no matter how important, expect a response in around 2 or so days (the norm). Second, they make it very clear that you're just another number, another contract, nothing more. When you sign that contract, you're in for 12 months. No matter how poorly they perform, they will NOT refund you. You have to take their poor support, their buggy platform, and their rude sales staff (that over promises and under delivers). Do your research, there are others out there with better support and around 1/10th the price. Don't make the same mistake we did!
Once up and running its great, however there is a steep learning curve. But stick with it and its worthwhile, making integration into various marketplaces easy. Dont come along thinking its a one stop shop for everything though, from my point of view its best used as tool for larger sellers (not startups) to manage inventory and send said inventory to multiple marketplaces. Ultimately it can be used to do everything, but not in house - you will have to connect CA up with other 3rd party tools. i.e their invoice printing system is poor so you may want to integrate with Metapack/netdespatch to handle that side. Value isnt too bad. Dont get me wrong you will wince at what things cost, but if you look at the bigger picture you'd need a few humans to do what CA does for breakfast... Get a demo, ask lots of questions and see for yourself....if you are looking to sell on multiple marketplaces then it could be just what you are after!
We have been using Channel Advisor now for several years. They are fantastic and the product is great. There is clearly a lot of work going on in the background to improve the product on a daily basis. The only stumbling block would be the price. It is quite costly as a percentage of sales...that said their blog articles, hints and tips and account managers help you with very useful stats and insights to prevent slip-ups.
They will Bring you on board and will provide no/ very little after sales service. Taking that much money won't end up with just advising. also if you want to come out of contract they will put in trap and say you have 6 more months to go as this is one year service and have to pay full in balance up to end of contract (I have to pay £6000.00) to end up relationship with them. Being customer for 2 year my sales were same place where we have started. There are many software out there way much cheaper and provide more services then them. Don't signup with them you will be disappointed. So Sad :( Bad business no one want to have.
We signed up with Channel Advisor to grow our sales through the marketplaces. The set-up process is well planned and our advisor through this stage was excellent. I then had an issue with the service as I felt that I had received help getting live and then left to it. I did talk to Channel Advisor about this and things have improved dramatically. I have been put in touch with some great contacts and I know have tangible recommendations and ideas to achieve the growth that we signed up with Channel Advisor for.
When we joined CA two years ago it was for one reason only...GROWTH. CA have helped us treble our Turnover and establish strong overseas markets. The opportunities created working alongside the specialists at CA have made it possible to aim very high with our Retail Targets and our Account Managers help us believe that they are achievable. In 2015 we joined the Managed Services Team to help us accelerate our growth even further and significantly increase our SKU listings. With their support we constantly explore the true potential of our Retail Operations and this has set our ambitions even higher and its working! The Costs incurred are considerable and have to be seen as investment in the future. However as the bulk of the costs are Fixed Costs it means they become a small percentage of each sale as Retail Income increases. As a Sales & Marketing Director I also need to be assured that revenue streams are reliable so my interest also had an assurance element to it. In the event that anything goes wrong I know I have an army of specialists there to support us. As Amazon & EBay get more and more complicated its impossible for my Retail Team to keep fully integrated with these near daily changes in policies and procedures. If you are serious about On Line Retailing I can highly recommend Channel Advisor as a great working Partner to help you achieve your ambitions. Shaun FSD
ChannelAdvisor’s retail analytics give us the ability to create customisable reports that deliver the insights we need to make performance-driven business decisions down to the product level. We have full clarity into campaigns, and this helps us plan and execute campaigns to help our customers excel online. Since working with ChannelAdvisor, we’ve seen our GMV grow by 200%. We look forward to an exciting future with ChannelAdvisor.
I've been working with CA for over 2 years and have always found them very helpful and professional. CA stepped up our CSEs activity to new frontiers. Highly recommend.
Channel Advisors is for large companies with a dedicated IT department and extra money to spend. If your company small and likes to receive what it has been promised and paid for do not sign the contract. Please read all complaints on Ripoff Report and Better Business Bureau. Hundreds of emails, phone calls, and a letter to the Chief Revenue Officer all unanswered and ignored. Or company decided to quit trying to get help and asked to be released from contract because Channel Advisor was unable to fulfill the agreement and finish launching our business. We wanted no refunds we only wanted not to pay the remaining three months since our product was never launched. Again Channel Advisors failed to respond to all correspondence and phone calls. The first call we ever received is from a collection agency wondering why payment had not been received. We forwarded all emails, letters, etc. to collections and have not received a call again. We did receive another statement for past due amount including interest. Speaking to lawyers it will cost more in lawyer fees than we owe on the contract. We are not going to pay. Our company works for every dollar we make and we expect Channel Advisors to do the same.
Channel Advisor has been a crucial part in growing our company, once up and running its the essayist way to manage products over multiple channels. Well worth the investment.
As a client of ChannelAdvisor, I am telling you from experience what we went through extremely difficult hardships with the company. We started in good faith and wanted to end in good faith. However, we were trying and trying to work with them, but all they want is your money and they are not willing to help you in any way. They promise you everything but they don't deliver. They promised that they will help us setup the process for eBay and Amazon, we paid extra set up fee for setting up each platform. However, they gave us inexperienced workers which misguided us causing us to lose thousands of dollars. Initially they told us the losses they caused us will be reimbursed. But when it came to pay, the company formed against us in a very unprofessional way, not to help out the customer. We very much wanted to grow with ChannelAdvisor on all platforms however their behavior was ruthlessly unkind, unprofessional in this matter. After our mess up we found out that many other clients where going through the same hardships and even worse experiences with ChannelAdvisor. Be extremely cautious with them as they promise you many things initially but the people employed there are very not well trained and very unkind and cause huge mess ups. So watch where you spend your money!! We highly recommend you not sign up with ChannelAdvisor!!
Robin
Oct 19,2016If you are reading this you have probably spoken with Channel Advisor and are considering using their services, I did exactly the same thing but sadly for me I am now £30,000 out of pocket with virtually nothing to show for it. You have probably had a smart sales person on the phone to you regularly or maybe even visiting you, telling you they have looked at your business and they are convinced they can help you build sales, other members of the "team" have looked at your business and they too are convinced it is going to work. It all sounds great. They have probably told you that it is like taking on a new employee but instead of that you will be getting an entire team of experts. DO NOT LISTEN TO THEM! As soon as you are signed up that sales person is gone, replaced by 1 person who will then be on annual leave every 5 minutes and all those promises and guarantees which you will not have in writing will have disappeared and all you have now is possibilities and large invoice to pay. Do yourself a favour, get away whilst you can! Good luck if you don't...