I’m happy to announce that this past Saturday, ChannelAdvisor shipped its April release. One of the major items released was Shop.com CPC Support in the US and the UK!

This new CPC model allows customers to take advantage of Shop.com ’s traffic and treat it like a traditional comparison shopping engine rather than a marketplace.

To my knowledge (and if you can’t trust a Google/News/Blog search, who can you trust?), we’re the first third-party to announce support for this. We’re seeing substantial interest in this new, easy to use channel from Shop.com and believe this immediately vaults their site into the “top tier” of paid comparison shopping engines in the US. Did I mentioned we added support for our UK customers as well?

The same feed supports either the existing Shop.com marketplace (CPO) or the cost-per-click offering. The customer’s relationship with Shop.com determines which solution they are a part of. Here’s some more information from Shop.com directly about their different programs.

With ChannelAdvisor? Shop.com is enabled as a channel for all customers on the ChannelAdvisor Complete platform, both MarketplaceAdvisor Premium and full ShoppingAdvisor customers. Contact your Corporate Account Manager for more details.

Not with ChannelAdvisor? Get more information on how to sign up.

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One of the core strategies we at ChannelAdvisor continuously advocate – naturally – is going multi-channel. Diversifying your online sales channels not only protects you from having all your proverbial eggs (revenue) in one basket (channel), it helps you grow your business by exposing you to a broader audience of potential buyers.

But how much does going multi-channel help, really? To quantify the benefits, we studied same-store sales across our customer based in 2006 and 2007 to see what the growth characteristics looked like as a function of channel strategy.

We broke things down into three basic categories:

1. Customers who were single-channel (e.g., eBay-only) in 2006 who stayed single-channel in 2007. We’ll call this the S/S group.
2. Customers who were single-channel (e.g., eBay-only) in 2006, who went multi-channel (for example, added Amazon.com, a storefront, or Shopping Channels) in 2007. We’ll call this the S/M group.
3. Customers who were multi-channel in 2006 and remained so in 2007. We’ll call this the M/M group.

What we found was interesting, and surprised even us! Here were our findings:

The S/S group (those who stayed single-channel) grew their sales at an average rate of 11% year over year. While this growth isn’t bad on an absolute basis, it reflects the fact that many of our eBay sellers are “capped out” by eBay’s overall slowing growth rate and, ultimately, losing overall e-commerce share to sellers on other marketplaces that are growing more rapidly (like Amazon.com).
The average growth rate for M/M customers (those who went multi-channel more than a year ago) was 42% higher than the S/S group.
Most surprisingly, the median growth rate for S/M customers (who went multi-channel sometime in 2007) was 220% higher than the average growth rate of the S/S group, and 160% higher than that of the M/M group. Needless to say, customers who made the jump from single-channel to multi-channel in 2007 are probably looking back and wondering why they didn’t do so sooner!

What does this mean for you? I hope it quantifies what we’ve been saying all along – that going multi-channel has a significant benefit to your top-line while simultaneously decreasing your risk that the changing dynamics of any one channel will adversely affect your business.

So, if you haven’t actively considered going multi-channel yet, we strongly recommend you make 2008 the year you do so! The benefits are real.

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We’ve released a slew of new features yesterday (head on over to our Strategy & Support Center for the complete release notes) thanks to another biscuit-fueled round of hard work by our agile development super force (also often called software engineers), but the biggest of them all is definitely our new Dashboard.

It shows by customizable date range your total sales, Average Selling Price (ASP) or quantity sold (among other things) so that you can determine where you sell the most volume or generate your highest margins. (more…)

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Hot on the heals of BlueBay Electronics, another ChannelAdvisor customer has been recognised for their online success in 2007.

This time the award goes to one of our UK customers, Schuhstore, who just picked up the first ever ‘Auction Seller of the Year 2007′ award at eBay’s recent Backstage VIP party in London.

The team at Schuh, led by ecommerce whiz kid himself, Dan Lumb, has exceeded all expectations this year, moving over one hundred thousand pairs of shoes in the last 12 months through the eBay channel. Yes, you read that correctly, in the last 12 months they have amassed a massive 111,500 postivie feedbacks (although that number is increasing as I type this!)

We’ve been working with Schuh for just about a year now and we’ve enjoyed every moment of it. It’s people like Dan and the Schuh team that make us excited to come into work in the morning and we love the constant pressure they put on us to improve. We couldn’t be happier that their success has been recognised in such a appropriate way.

Congratulations to the Schuh team from everyone at ChannelAdvisor - great job!

p.s. if you’re after some light entertainment, be sure to check out the rather strange, but amusing ‘silent movie‘ on their eBay blog…

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Earlier this year we introduced the concept of labels to ChannelAdvisor Complete. In our current implementation, labels are a way to dynamically group inventory items together. But why did we choose to do this? Why is this useful?

You might hear labels referred to as tags on other web destinations. Sites like Flickr, del.icio.us, and Gmail popularized their use as a flexible way to organize information. They are short, free text descriptors that you assign to a piece of information so you can group it together with other similar data. For instance on Flickr you can label all your photos of your kid’s soccer games with “soccer” and search on that keyword later to find them all. Or you can have Gmail automatically label your incoming e-mails from specific people with “Chicago” to find messages from all of your friends who live there.

Currently labels in ChannelAdvisor are used to group inventory items together. You can use labels to tag your items as “clearance” for example. Or you can label a set of inventory as “holiday” items. Or you can mark some inventory as both “clearance” and “holiday” - you can assign as many labels as you like to an item!

Once you have labels on inventory, you can filter it by label in the All Items view. This enables you to segment your inventory and operate on just that subset of your items.

So why use labels when you can just group inventory together with ChannelAdvisor’s classifications? For one thing, an item can only belong to one classification at a time. Classifications are good for a general category such as “men’s boots”. But if you want to segment your inventory as clearance items across many classifications (say, “men’s boots” and “women’s boots”) you are better off using a clearance label to accomplish this.
(more…)

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