We announced during last week’s Catalyst conference in Pinehurst, NC (Chris at TameBay of course was quick to cover it) our support for Buy.com — and needless to say attendees were crowding Buy.com CEO Neel Grover with questions on product fit, how quickly they could launch, fees and international capabilities.

Here’s a quick snapshot that highlights this opportunity:

• Buy.com’s shopping experience is similar to the Amazon marketplace with checkout occurring on the site.
• No listing fees (risk-free selling!), only category-specific commission for each sale.
• Buy.com today has over 11 Million buyers purchasing consumer electronics, jewelry, home & garden, media and health & beauty products.
• Launch of apparel and shoes category forthcoming.
• Approximately 1,000 sellers are participating in the marketplace today.
• Backfilling select product detail pages with comparison shopping links from Pricegrabber and select other CSEs. Here’s a good example of a Nikon D40 bundle that shows how these offerings live side-by-side.

We have been working with Buy.com on our end-to-end integration so that you spend as little time as possible listing your products and processing your orders within ChannelAdvisor and will be launching our solution in the summer. If you are interested (and you should be) head on over to http://www.channeladvisor.com/buycom/ to be one of the first in line to sell on Buy.com through our MarketplaceAdvisor Premium product. Or ping me with any questions that you may have at maxl at channeladvisor.com.

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Whew - 2008! I hope everyone had a great trip into the new year and recovered from a wild holiday shopping season. 2007 was a big year for many of our customers that mastered (automated) existing online eCommerce channels and expanded into new ones (add’l CSEs, paid search campaigns, new marketplaces). It was also a good year for ChannelAdvisor with cool new products (big shout out to the kick-*** ShoppingAdvisor team) and joining forces with Marketworks.

We’ve anticipated your “Enough dwelling on the past already” and painstakingly created a list of New Year’s Resolutions that should be on your list if you’re ready to turn the dial on your business to 11 in 2008 (I’ll never get tired of Spinal Tap references). (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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Back by popular demand, we’re excited to announce the expanded 2007 series of ‘ChannelAdvisor Insite‘ conferences, taking place in cities all over the UK and Ireland this summer.

If you’re an online retailer, planning your strategy for Q4 and beyond, then take a day away from the distractions of the office, and come to one of these highly informative one-day events.

Join ChannelAdvisor and industry experts, and your peers as we focus on some of the most effective strategies and techniques for boosting sales and improving the profitability of your online business. We will cover topics such as eBay, Amazon Seller Central, Google Checkout, PayPal Express Checkout, Paid Search Marketing and Shopping Comparison engines and, with a combination of presentations and workshops, equip you with the tools required to go back to your business and make an immediate impact.

This summer we shall be visiting a total of six cities with the Insite event - starting in Bristol on the 16th August, then London, Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham and finally Dublin in mid-October.

And, thanks to generous sponsorship by Google (Gold), Cybersource and the FOEB (Silver), we are able to keep the cost to a minimum - only £49 + VAT per person for a full 8-hour day of learning! I think you’ll agree this represents tremendous value-for-money - in fact, as we’re limiting places to 25 delegates per event, we expect all six events to be oversubscribed. So if you’re interested in taking your online business to the next level this Christmas, be sure to sign up straight away and reserve your place.

Here’s a link to the official Insite website where you can see more details on the agenda and register to attend. Hey, why not bring someone else from your company as well so you can bounce ideas off each other during the day and take action when you’re back in the office?

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Welcome news for online retailers looking to grow their multichannel portfolio: Amazon now allows merchants to sign-up and launch in qualified categories online without any queue, review or qualification (woohoo!). The team in Seattle is working hard on making it easy for any merchant to sell products on the site and I think this is only the first of many steps to come towards improving the selling experience (watch out eBay).

To get started simply go to www.amazonservices.com/promerchant, click on “Start Selling on Amazon”, verify that your category allows instant sign-up and follow the step-by-step instructions.

The Apparel & Accessories, Beauty, Industrial and Scientific, Jewelry and Watches, Personal Computer or Gourmet Food categories continue to be gated with review and approval by an Amazon category manager. If you’d like to sell in a gated or closed category let us know — there’s no secret sauce but we’ve developed a set of tips and best practices that have helped our merchants make a strong business case for successful admission (and no, that does not include writing anything in German).

I am a little surprised that the Books / Music / Video category sign-up still points to the Marketplaces platform. Amazon has begun the migration of this grand daddy of categories to its new Seller Central platform in Q1 2007 and plans to cease the legacy Marketplaces tool in the U.S. by the end of the year. My money is more on early to mid-2008 since I doubt that Amazon would force a migration during the busiest shopping season of the year.

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