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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Our annual conference for retailers large and small, ChannelAdvisor Catalyst, kicks off today and the excitement at ChannelAdvisor is palpable.  For us Catalyst represents two very important things.

First, the definition of catalyst is: “A substance that speeds up a chemical or biochemical reaction that would have occurred anyway (without help), but at a much slower rate.”   At ChannelAdvisor we see the world of ecommerce changing rapidly towards multiple ecommerce channels (Search/CSE/Marketplaces) and view ChannelAdvisor’s role as accelerating this change for our customers so they can successfully navigate those changes.  The Catalyst conference is our chance to discuss with our customers, partners and other industry folks what we think the major trends in ecommerce are and what we’re doing about them.

Second, when Aris and I founded CA, we wanted to create a company that deeply PARTNERED with our customers, not the typical “please buy our software and don’t call us” kind of relationship.  We believe ChannelAdvisor’s inherent customercentricitity has made ChannelAdvisor a unique company to work with and a unique company to work FOR (shameless plug, we’re hiring for lots of positions right now).

With customers at the heart of our DNA you can imagine that the opportunity to sit down, meet with, break bread and drink (everyone watch out for Todd Rath on this one and some of our friends from the UK!) with over 400 of our customers, partners and friends makes us pretty dang excited.

Today is the annual golf tournament (I don’t golf but hear that things are off to a great start thanks to the awesome weather here this am and the Pinehurst courses are beautiful and in great shape.).  Then tonight we kick things off with a keynote from Davis Ridley.  Davis ran customer service for Southwest airlines.  In ecommerce, customer service is one of the best ways to distinguish yourself from competitors.  In the airline industry, SouthWest consistently beats every other airline in all aspects of customer service so we thought someone that could achieve what Davis has in one of THE toughest customer service industries would be a great way to start the conference.

Tomorrow’s agenda is here. I won’t be able to blog at the conference, but Max Leisten (aka the Crazy German) is going to be carrying the live-blogging duties forward so even if you weren’t able to attend this year we’ll be keeping you abreast of developments as they happen.

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Every year the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) recognizes excellence in software via an award program they call the //CODiE// awards. We just learned today that ChannelAdvisor Merchant was chosen as a finalist in both the Best Business Software Solution and Best eCommerce Solution categories!

You can read all of the details on the program here.

This is admittedly a super-geeky accomplishment, but, heck, as a guy that still sleeps in his Star Wars underoos, this is pretty dang exciting. I wanted to thank the entire ChannelAdvisor team for all of the hard work that has gone into making Merchant a huge success and most importantly our customers. Without you, there would be no ChannelAdvisor and of course, no opportunity to be a //CODiE// finalist!

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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…)

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Although by no means a comprehensive survey or scientific analysis, W3 Counters is showing the Firefox browser now with a 25% market share while Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is at 65% (based on user stats reported by around 4,000 websites).

Pretty significant gain and exciting to see some competition (and innovation) back in the browser market. More importantly for merchants this means that it is absolutely critical to test the buyer’s shopping experience in both browsers to make sure your products look good and your checkout works flawless.

Here are a few Firefox extensions that you may find useful for managing and enhancing your content:

• Web Developer — Toolbar that comes in very handy for developing and validating HTML let’s say for an eBay Ad or your eCommerce site.

• IE Tab — Open a site in Internet Explorer right within a tab in Firefox. Very useful for checking that your page looks good in both Firefox and Microsoft’s browser.

• FireBug — This extension gets you really into the details of website development, enabling you to examine and fix your HTML, Javascript, CSS and more.

• PDF Download — Choose whether to download or view a PDF in your browser. Great little utility especially if you don’t want to look at a PDF but simply store it for later (yes, I know, doesn’t really have to do anything with web development, but it’s so darn handy that I had to sneak it in here).

Got other Firefox extensions you can’t live without?

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