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.

(more…)

Share This

On Tuesday we posted some comments from large UK media sellers on the recent changes in the eBay fee structure in certain media-related categories.

Today we turn to a large UK seller in the consumer electronics category for their reaction.

Luzern Solutions, based out of Dublin, uses ChannelAdvisor Merchant to sell refurbished and new PDAs, printers, projectors and other high ticket item consumer electronics on eBay UK (seller id luzerntech), France, Spain, Germany, Ireland and Italy (phew, did I miss any!) - as well as on Amazon and through their own ChannelAdvisor-powered website - www.luzernsolutions.com.

The man in charge of their eBay operations, Pat Sherlock, was overall in favour of the changes, although he felt there was still more to be done.

The reduction in the fees for computers and consumer electronics categories is certainly welcome news for LuzernTech. Coupled with the T&S initiatives this will allow large sellers like ourselves the opportunity to have more confidence and sell more products in the eBay marketplace as opposed to having to resort to other, less costly, channels. We obviously believe that as large high quality sellers we enhance eBay’s reputation every time we complete a sale on eBay. We still feel that the inflexibility of the fee structure and resulting inability for high volumes seller to achieve economies of scale for this area of costs is still a problem that eBay needs to address.

I agree with Pat - the recent T&S initiatives have been another big step in the right direction. But I’m interested to hear what blog readers think about Pat’s suggestion of discounts for higher volume sellers. It happens in every other area of business but eBay has always dismissed the concept - saying it upsets its ‘level playing field’ philosophy. What do you think?

Share This

Greetings! This is my second post in a series I recently started discussing the Software Development Lifecycle we use here at ChannelAdvisor. If you have not yet read my prior posting on this topic, you may want to do so now. It’s a fascinating tale of pirates, danger, monkeys, and death defying software development on the high seas!

Previously I covered the concept of Software as a Service and then delved into the different system “environments” we utilize to deploy our software. In this post I will describe the concept of a “Change Request” and how those are categorized, ticketed and tracked. In upcoming posts I’ll focus on how Change Requests are deployed (”Short Term” and “Long Term” releases), and will delve into our movement towards Agile Development.

Change Requests
Within the company, every time a defect is found in our software (ahem, never), every time someone mentions “wouldn’t it be cool if the product could do X” (ahem, always), and every time a service request is issued to the engineering group, a “Change Request” (CR) ticket is opened to record and track the request. We literally log hundreds and thousands of these requests against ourselves, no matter how large or small in scope.

With all of those tickets opened, the use of Change Management software is critical to providing us order from the chaos. Currently we use a product called Synergy Change from Telelogic. It’s a solid product and serves our needs sufficiently, but could definitely be a little cheaper (just in case someone from Telelogic is reading this heehee).

(more…)

Share This

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a joyful and triumphant holiday season. Only 4 short weeks remain before it is no longer socially acceptable to keep those Christmas lights shining brightly in the front yard. Fight the power!

In today’s blog I wanted to start off a new series that focused on how we actually develop software here at CA. I’m not referring to specific algorithms or architectures, but rather the overall Software Development Lifecycle.

Why on earth would you care about that? Well, if you ever had a bug you wanted fixed (and of course our software has no bugs, right?) or a feature you wanted added to the product, it’s empowering to know how we approach software development to better understand what and when changes can be delivered. This is a big topic with lots of facets to cover, so I’m going to split this into 3 parts. Think of it as a trilogy if you will. Hopefully you’ll find the plot to be interesting and the acting better than that of Hayden Christensen.

I’m good…no wait I’m evil!

Software as a Service
Although this is likely blatantly obvious to many, it’s worth reviewing as it’s critical to understanding our development process: all ChannelAdvisor products, including Pro, Merchant, Search, Shopping, and more, are what the industry calls Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. SaaS products are typically web based and are expected to be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year (we take leap day off, j/k), with some small exceptions for occasional early morning maintenance windows. SaaS solutions have tremendous advantages to our customers: all you need is a web browser to use our tools anywhere in the world, any time of day or night. No need to install from a CD or get the latest patch, you’re always guaranteed to be on the latest and greatest version with no effort on your side required. If there’s a bug that needs to be fixed or a new feature people are screaming for, we just push out that change to our production server environment and (Bam!) everyone gets the change. This is good stuff.

(more…)

Share This

Now, if you’re looking for good PR, you can’t get better than the front page of CNN.com. And yesterday, that’s exactly what ChannelAdvisor customer, Clare Price from The Contemporary Home, achieved - with a helping hand from the ChannelAdvisor PR team!

The Contemporary Home sells a range of cool interior accessories for the modern home and in just over two years, Clare has built a strong multi-channel online business in the UK. She started the business as a hobby but ended up quitting her full-time job as an IT consultant and enlisting her husband, Craig as a business parter as her operation grew.

Clare chose ChannelAdvisor as her technology and strategy partner in March 2006 and has taken her business to a whole new level in the last 9 months. She sells on eBay, Amazon, as well as a very professional-looking ChannelAdvisor Store (check it out at www.thecontemporaryhome.co.uk). She also makes good use of ChannelAdvisor’s shopping engine feed functionality to drive fresh traffic to her website.

Clare was interviewed by a journalist from Reuters just before Christmas and the story ‘hit the wire’ (as they say in press circles) yesterday. It’s really great to see Clare gain global recognition for her success - she’s worked very hard to get where she is today and had a lot of fun along the way. The CA UK team has very much enjoyed working with her and we’re looking forward to more of the same in 2007!

Here’s a photo of Clare with her husband and business partner, Craig, on holiday (or is that the office…?)

*** STOP PRESS *** This just in …… the story has also been picked up by Yahoo and can be found on their front page! Here’s the direct link to the article in case they take it off the front page before you have a chance to read it.

Share This