Greetings all. Hopefully lots of you were able to join us at our Catalyst Conference last week. I know I enjoyed sharing a beer with many of you by the pool (wish it was a little warmer, but not exactly a rough life).

Anyway, today I wanted to spend a little time talking about a topic I brought up awhile ago: Monitoring. I don’t pretend to be an industry expert on monitoring, or even a ChannelAdvisor expert for that matter, but I do know enough to be dangerous. I also feel this is a pretty important topic for you to understand, as our use of monitoring really can have a material impact on your business (or more appropriately, a lack of good monitoring can have a materially negative impact on your business, something we take seriously).

What is Monitoring?

As I covered in a prior posting, our products operate as a Software as a Service solution. This means our software must be online and ready to service transactions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The ChannelAdvisor software accomplishes a wide range of tasks under this charter: from posting auctions to ebay, to bidding on keywords on Google, to sending data feeds to Shopping.Com, to serving up checkouts to your customers. All of this software runs on lots and lots of servers, well over 200 and growing steadily by my last count.

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It appears that eBay has begun to ease its counterfeiting policies first introduced in November 2006. An eBay account manager confirmed earlier today that sellers may again sell and ship Adidas and Nike products to Asian countries that were embargoed (China, South Korea). The account manager stressed that it’s still not permitted to ship these products from Asia.

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UK online ad spend has overtaken that spent on national newspaper advertising for the first time, while Google has also extended its dominance of the market.

New figures from the IAB and PwC reveal that online ad spending passed the £2bn mark for the first time last year, with the market growing by a massive 41% from 2005.

Meanwhile, ad spend on traditional media declined, with TV advertising spend falling by 4.7% to £3.9bn, and national newspaper advertising growing only slightly, by 0.2% to £1.9bn.

Google also confirmed its dominance of the UK online ad market, gobbling up 43% of total UK online ad spend and increasing its ad revenue from £483m in 2005 to £872m last year.

In addition, 75% of paid search spending in the UK last year went straight into Google’s pockets. In 2005, 63% of the paid search market went to Google.

Here are some other highlights from the IAB report:

• The UK now has the world’s highest proportion of online ad spend, with online accounting for 11.4% of total ad spend last year.
• By contrast, online advertising accounts for around 7.5% of total ad spend in the US, while the global average is 5.8%.
• National newspapers’ share of UK ad spend last year was 10.9%.
• Paid search accounted for 57.8% of the UK’s online ad spend last year, a total of £1.2bn. (E-consultancy predicted that the paid search market would reach £1.26bn in May’s Search Marketing Buyer’s Guide).
• Online display advertising (inc. banners, skyscrapers and online sponsorships) rose 35% last year to £453.7m.
• Classified advertising online also grew, by 45% to £379m, a market share of 18.8%.
• Online advertising achieved its highest market share ever in the second half of 2006 when expenditure topped £1.098bn - a 12.4% share of the market.

Source: http://www.e-consultancy.com/news-blog/362973/online-ad-spend-overtakes-newspapers.html

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One powerful feature of ChannelAdvisor Complete is inventory variations. You may also hear this called “matrix inventory” or “parent/child relationships.” The main advantage of implementing inventory variations is that you can group many similar items together so they appear to the buyer as a single entry in your online store with configurable choices. This makes your store less cluttered and easier to navigate - with the end result that the buyers can more easily find and purchase what they want!

For instance, say you are selling shoes. For every style of shoe you stock there is a size and color, and therefore you have one SKU for each style/size/color combination. Normally you and your buyers would have to operate on each SKU individually. With inventory relationships, you can create a parent SKU that represents all inventory for that style, and have a group of child SKUs that vary by size and color.

As an example, let’s look at the ChannelAdvisor Store for one of our good friends, Designer Athletic. They have configured most of their inventory within ChannelAdvisor to be in variation relationships, but here is an example of one that isn’t.

This shows a single entry for a Timberland size nine brown chukka boot. If the buyer was actually looking for a size ten, they could not buy it from this page. They would have to leave and look for the correct size. Once they found the size ten in the right style, perhaps they really wanted a different color. More hunting. Wouldn’t it be easier if all of these related shoes were available on one page?

Enter inventory variations. If you group all shoes of a particular style into one relationship with variations of size and color, you can display a single page to the buyer with all of their options. Take a look at this ChannelAdvisor Store page for a Timberland field boot.

Note the choices for size and color. In addition, there is no final price displayed because it varies for the individual child SKUs. At this point, the buyer can select the size that they are looking for.

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We saved some of the more exciting news at Catalyst 2007 for last with Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne announcing that ChannelAdvisor and Overstock have entered into a strategic partnership.

ChannelAdvisor merchants can now sell on this $800 million marketplace with over 9 million unique monthly visitors through our ChannelAdvisor merchant platform. At the same time we announced a “no ChannelAdvisor fees through March 31, 2008″ promotion (but kick-backs in the form of Belgium chocolate are certainly not discouraged).

As soon as the news was out Patrick and his team were mobbed by online retailers across all categories with questions like “How quickly can I get started?”, “Do you already sell my product?”, “What type of merchandise are you looking for?”, “What do you mean with ‘no fees’? You mean absolutely no fees? None?”, “Is there someone without a funny German accent we can talk to about Overstock?”.

While I go through dozens of emails and voice mails following the conference, I encourage all online retailers interested in this great opportunity to fill out our form at http://www.channeladvisor.com/overstock. We are planning a number of joint webinars over the next few months with more information on Overstock Shopping, why you should sell there, what it takes to succeed on this marketplace and how to get started through ChannelAdvisor.

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