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Fair and Balanced review of Marketplaces component
April 26, 2014

Fair and Balanced review of Marketplaces component

Brent Boutwell | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Marketplaces

Overall Satisfaction with ChannelAdvisor

Currently we are leveraging ChannelAdvisor to manage our marketplace integration between the enterprise and eBay, with a secondary integration for pushing product ads to Amazon. This is not currently fully integrated as there would be additional software engineering resources that would be required that don't currently exist. We are only leveraging it in the ecommerce department but it could be used more widely given more support for the program by executive decision makers. While initially it did reduce the amount of effort to push a larger assortment of products to the individual marketplaces, it's real benefit was in fulfillment by the enterprise by importing order data into the company's back end processes.
  • More robust integration with a number of marketplaces than its competitors
  • Better user interface
  • Heavily skewed towards pushing Amazon as the primary marketplace. Should be balanced better across a wider portfolio of marketplaces
  • While the UI is user friendly, accommodating for varying use cases required significant technical intervention from CA support teams. Teams are not always in sync on how best to complete the requested tasks.
  • Reporting data does not seem to sync with eBay or enterprise data. Large amount of time spent trying to identify why CA's reporting is different
  • Definitely a more efficient process for employees or resources managing the channel
  • if we had to do it over again I don't think we would engage the managed services, just to expensive for the service we've received
  • And there was contradictory information from the 'experts' that we received on strategy. We saw and experienced something completely different that they were saying.
Infopia - CA was definitely more robust but more difficult to use. Infopia is out of business now but it was very competitive with them for a brief period of time.
Right now the organization is trying to determine if the cost for managing a marketplaces channel is worth the ongoing expense based on our return and acquisition of customers.
Larger companies that are fully supportive of marketplaces as a significant channel strategy would fare better than smaller or less committed companies that may not have the resources to spend on understanding and managing the details of the system. If the organization has the capitol, they may want to look into the managed services program as an alternative.

ChannelAdvisor Implementation Rating and Lessons

Better control of scope between the resources on both sides involved would allow for better change management.
  • Implemented in-house
Yes - Product Data integration, Order Data integration, Enterprise reporting integration
Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled - As straight forward as the implementation was, there were some significant issues with integration that primarily stemmed from the enterprise that required scope cutting in order to accommodate the target dates.
  • Data field mapping
  • Data sync timing between the enterprise / eBay / and CA