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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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.
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I have just returned from Overstock.com’s Partner Summit in sunny Salt Lake City, Overstock’s annual event for key merchants selling on this marketplace.

First of all, the Overstock team knows how to put on a show. I heard a lot of positive comments about the format: one full day of company presentations with no other events (such as roundtables) and a second day of presentations by solution providers. No distractions or conflicts and merchants were divided into groups to give everyone an opportunity to see all content.

I also had the opportunity to provide an overview of our support for this marketplace to attendees (as part of a comprehensive channel portfolio, of course) and even met a few ChannelAdvisor merchants already taking advantage of Overstock’s ability to move a lot of product (all looking for more marketing opportunities and buyer search data to drive sourcing).

Three things that stood out for me at the event: (more…)

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Excited about Overstock.com and want to learn more about how it works and how it could fit into your multi-channel portfolio (I better see lots of hands in the air)? Here’s your chance to hear straight from Overstock.com’s CEO Patrick Byrne (joined by Scot) how this marketplace can significantly accelerate your sales and how to get started.

Join us next week Wednesday, April 25 at 2 p.m. EDT for a webinar on the leading online closeout retailer for brand name merchandise to hear about:

• What is Overstock Shopping?
• How is it different from other online channels?
• How does it work for buyers and merchants?
• How to get started with your products?
• How does Overstock work through ChannelAdvisor?
• Q&A

Want to get started right away? Let us know about your interest and we’ll help you reach Overstock’s 9 million unique monthly visitors.

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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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