ChannelAdvisor Feedback

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    Jason

    I know BHFO is making use of ChannelAdvisor, maybe they can chime in on their experience?

    Also, it sounds like RetailOps has a direct integration to import orders form Amazon natively, anyone using that yet?

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    Alisdair Troup

    Channel advisor is good and offers a very wide array of configuration options, and supports a large number of marketplaces.  It is not cheap.  We have found it to be robust and any support required has been prompt and helpful. 

    The RO direct only supports Amazon (not eBay) and will handle orders and tracking but will not push the catalogue at this time. 

    Because of the different countries we sell in we have a different feed for each into CA.  I don't imagine you will have any difficulties setting those up, the only oddity is that you need to express a negative value for some fields ( tags for example) so if you do not want to pass the tag "Amazon" then you need to pass "-Amazon" - other than that it was quite straight forward. 

    We do not use CA for any of their Digital Marketing tools. 

    I hope this helps if you have any other questions, just let me know. 

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    Colin

    Similar experience with Channel Advisor. Solid platform, lots of options, significant price tag. 

    While at times we have questioned the cost of the system, there have been times that they as a company have stepped up to help us with a marketplace issues. With Channel Advisor you aren't just buying SaaS software, you're getting their expertise and support in dealing with issues from launching on new marketplaces to suspensions on existing marketplaces. 

    We do experience frequent problems with the returns process between RO to CA, on a daily basis there are returns that must be manually processed, or retried, but product data, and inventory don't have issues. 

    For the CA Digital Marketing services, their managed services are over extended and management of them is basic at best, and non-existent at worst. As for the software part of it, it isn't anything you can't get directly from the PPC channels as of last summer where we ended that part of our relationship with CA. 

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    Colin

    For reference, we use CA for Amazon, eBay, & JET currently. Previously had feeds to Newegg & Sears.

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    Jason

    Thanks for the feedback Gentlemen. We would only be using them for marketplace management, our marketing team takes care of everything on that side in house.

    So here's the big question I guess, does everyone just pay the published rates, or is there room for negotiation?

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    Alisdair Troup

    We also have problems with returns as you have described.

    I have found their sales team to be quite flexible and open to negotiation (but it is still not cheap). 

     

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    Joe B.

    Has anyone here taken a closer look at the Feedonomics platform when evaluating marketplace management platforms? http://feedonomics.com/

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    Alisdair Troup

    Hi Sam,

    Does RO have a feed for Feedonomics or any experience integrating with them?   

     

    They do look to be a good option.

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    Joe B.

    We do not currently, however, as part of a recent partner network building initiative they were brought to our attention. I wanted too gauge feedback from our existing customer base. 

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    Jason

    They seem more focused on CSE and PLA type listings than actually pushing product to marketplaces and managing data in two directions to deal with orders, tracking, returns, etc.

    But maybe I'm missing something.

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    Jason

    Working through getting our feed configured for ChannelAdvisor and running into issues regarding variants that I haven't been able to get assistance with yet.

    Anyone have some screenshots of how their feed is configured that they don't mind sharing? Right now parent products are being created in ChannelAdvisor with a "standard" product type, so the parent <-> child relationship is not being conveyed correctly.

    Once I get this figured out I can write an article for the Knowledge base so no one else has to go through this.

    Thanks in advance!

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    Alisdair Troup

    Hi Jason,

    I think this screen shot may solve your issue, if not, let me know and I will add some more.  We have several different CA feeds running smoothly. 

     

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    Jason

    Thanks Alisdair! Appreciate the help, as always.

    So just to be clear, does the variation attribute (CfgAttributes) have to be defined in ChannelAdvisor manually ahead of time, or can they be created on the fly via the Feed like most other channels?

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    Alisdair Troup

    Hi Jason,

     

    My understanding is that the variation attribute ( size, colour etc) has to be defined in CA ahead of time.  It cannot create new attributes "on the fly".

    Also when you pass a product with no configurable attributes, you will need to pass a minus sign in front of each attribute to indicate that there are none. So for this particular feed we have 3 possible variations size, colour and flavours and so our syntax is attr.CfgAttributes || '-Size, -Colour, -Flavours'

    attr.CfgAttributes || '-Size, -Colour, -Flavours'

    If there is a configurable attribute ( the field CfgAttributes will return either a blank or one of size, colour or flavours) the use this, otherwise use '-Size, -Colour, -Flavours' to explicitly indicate that there are none. 

    It does seem unnecessarily complicated, but it does seem to work! 

    If you need anything else just let me know. 

     

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