ChannelAdvisor has been creating trusted solutions for eCommerce businesses since 2001 and helpng them with multi channel management. We spoke to their Chief Marketing Officer, Mike Shapaker to find out why brands are opting to use the platform to manage their sales channels. See the full interview below:
Why is ChannelAdvisor the industry’s #1 channel management provider?
According to Digital Commerce 360’s ‘Leading Vendors to the Top 1000 Retailers’ report,
ChannelAdvisor has been the leading channel management vendor to this segment of the
market for ten straight years now.ChannelAdvisor’s multichannel commerce platform enables
brands and retailers to connect to hundreds of channels and manage inventory, pricing, product
content, advertising, orders, and more, all from a central location. It’s much easier than trying to
manage each channel one at a time. The ChannelAdvisor platform makes it easier for our
customers to manage all their e-commerce operations more efficiently, to expand to new
channels with ease and, ultimately, to grow their sales.
Why is efficient channel management crucial to an e-commerce business's success?
Without efficient or centralized channel management, a brand or retailer needs to manually
integrate new channels and manage different product data formats for each channel, balance
inventory across channels, align pricing, and analyze performance data from different sources.
The ChannelAdvisor platform helps make all that easier, which allows our customers to focus
less on those time-consuming, manual tasks and more on managing the strategic aspects of
their businesses. The e-commerce landscape grows more competitive every day, and the
ChannelAdvisor platform also helps optimize product content and automate advertising
campaigns while keeping an eye on the competitive landscape. ChannelAdvisor also has
managed services teams to help customers that want extra support.
How does ChannelAdvisor help brands expand into new global markets?
ChannelAdvisor is integrated with hundreds of channels globally. Once a customer’s data is in
our platform, and the customer has taken the steps to do business with those partners in those
new markets, it is relatively straightforward to get a customer started with selling on a new
global channel. In addition, this year we introduced ChannelAdvisor Commerce Network, which
makes it easier for our customers and channel partners to discover each other, make
introductions, and start doing business together.
How can an e-commerce business save time and money with a ChannelAdvisor to Shopify, or ChannelAdvisor to Magento integration?
A lot of ChannelAdvisor customers integrate their webstores with our platform so they have one
place to manage inventory and orders across all of their channels, including their own
e-commerce sites. It helps enable that operational efficiency and consistency we mentioned
earlier.
What are the most popular marketplaces integrated into ChannelAdvisor?
We encourage brands and retailers who are our customers to leverage those marketplaces that
provide a good fit with their company strategies, target customers, and product categories. So,
the definition of “most popular” will vary for each unique business. That being said,
marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, and Walmart support a wide variety of product categories
and reach a mass market. Other marketplaces, such as Zalando in EMEA, are focused on
specific categories such as fashion. There are numerous examples across many product
categories. In the aggregate, we have seen strong growth this year in the more niche and
category-specific marketplaces.
We’ve seen a rise of niche marketplaces in various sectors including beauty and fashion, what trends should we expect to see emerging in 2022-2023?
One of the trends that we can expect to see continuing in 2022-2023 is retailers converting their
platforms into third-party marketplaces. For retailers, a marketplace provides a way to expand
the selection for consumers without the added inventory risk. Marketplaces allow retailers to
experiment with complementary products and enter adjacent categories. For brands,
marketplaces make it easier to reach new audiences; audiences that may not have been
possible before, given limits on the number of vendors that retailers were willing to work with.
Beyond marketplaces, other trends to keep an eye on include brand aggregators and possibly a
resolution for the supply chain issues that have been prevalent since the beginning of the
pandemic.
By integrating with ChannelAdvisor, how many countries can a seller sell into?
Our customers sell into dozens of countries across the Americas, EMEA, and Asia Pacific.
Typically, one of the most important questions to answer is whether a particular market is a good
fit for a seller’s products. The ChannelAdvisor platform provides the agility necessary to test
markets and then scale the business using various channels in those markets. We are
continually adding new channels, but one way to see available options is through the
ChannelAdvisor Channels We Support page.
How many orders transact through ChannelAdvisor each day?
We don’t publicly report on order numbers. But, to give you a sense of scale, our systems
process more than 2 billion product uploads per day and we add or update more than 330
million marketplace listings per day.
Why should brands choose ChannelAdvisor to manage their sales channels?
Studies show that consumers are using more and more digital channels to discover, research,
and buy products online. We believe that brands should meet consumers where they prefer to
discover and shop. To do this in a way that represents a brand well and is consistent across the
consumer buying journey requires the management of multiple integrations and the
management of a lot of details like inventory, product content, pricing, advertising, fulfillment,
and performance/ROI data. Scaling these operations is difficult without a multichannel
management platform and/or a team of experienced professionals. ChannelAdvisor has been in
this business for over 20 years, both with technology and managed services. And during that
time, we’ve helped thousands of brands get started and grow on these channels — against the
backdrop of an ever-evolving e-commerce landscape.
