I almost forgot to mention that I will be at Catalyst tomorrow—that’s Tuesday, April 1 (and this is not a joke, either). I’ll be at one of the roundtables, so drop by and say hello. I’ll only be there tomorrow, though.

See you!

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I am not one to panic easily, but if you have not yet registered for our conference in Pinehurst then it may just be your time to throw your arms in the air and in despair rush over to www.kayak.com to find a flight to Raleigh / Durham. Because you do not want to miss this event (or the great weather and golf in Pinehurst).

There will be many good speakers (yes, including Tank who you can see work hard in this latest episode of Tankworld), a set of expert roundtables to learn more about marketplaces, comparison shopping, search, website optimization and more. And of course insight into where ChannelAdvisor is heading in 2008 (meaning where our customers have told us we need to go).

I am particularly excited about 2 events: First, Sebastian Gunningham, head of Amazon’s third-party program, is going to talk about Amazon’s product portfolio for online retailers. And second, Ben Ling who spearheads Facebook’s foray into eCommerce will discuss eCommerce and advertising strategies for online retailers on this social networking wunderkind.

And if you’ve procrastinated so far, it’s time to register at www.channeladvisor.com/catalyst before it’s too late (I hear rooms at the famous Pinehurst Resort are almost gone).

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Time to follow up on my teaser post from last time. By the way, I found out that not everybody is aware that sometimes my posts are kind of long, so their complete text isn’t always on the main blog page. If you ever see a little bitty “(more…)” toward the end of the post, that means you need to click on the “(more…)” to read the full post. Today is no exception…(this is your cue to click on “(more…)”)
(more…)

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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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First, a brief house-keeping note. I edited my last post, because I had a conversation with one of our users and I realized I had not made something clear: the arrays (which I called “lists”) that are passed to REDUCE are not at all the same thing as a ShoppingAdvisor Lookup List. You can’t use a Lookup List as one of the inputs to REDUCE at all.

I always strive to be as clear as I can with these posts. Clear writing about technical subjects is tricky, though. However, the good news is that this conversation I had was the genesis of a new function that is coming with the next release. I hate to keep writing these teaser posts, but I guess it’s better than only writing a post after every release, isn’t it? Here’s the full story…
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