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ChannelSale, ChannelAdvisor, Mercent ...

by fmckinnon
14 replies
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Hey Gang,

We are at an impasse. We do not have our own I.T. staff and are in a place where we desperately need a solid integration platform that would manage all of our dropship inventory datafeeds and marketplace connections.

In summary, we have around 18+ dropship supplier datafeeds (and growing) with over 200,000 active SKU. We are active sellers on Amazon, Sears, BestBuy, Buy, Newegg, and somewhat active on Ebay.

I saw a post here about ChannelSale.Com - has anyone used them? I'd love to hear more reviews. They are flat-fee, which is nice, and claim integration into all of these platforms.

I tried ChannelAdvisor back in January. For our # of SKU, it's very expensive, and the revenue sharing, even at an insanely reduced rate, is several thousand (ie. $5K+) per month. We weren't able to stay because although they did allow multiple datafeed connections, they were unable to detect dropped SKU unless you have one, single, consolidated feed from all suppliers. (which we're working on).

I have been negotiating with mercent for months since, and came very close to signing - same issue, price/revenue sharing, and then I realized they aren't anywhere close yet to supporting NewEgg which is our #2 marketplace.

ChannelSale caught my eye - maybe there are other options as well.

Our main objective is to have:
* consolidated inventory managment of ALL suppliers
* direct integration for listing, qty, price management on ALL marketplaces above
* reprice engine for Amazon based on floor price/biz rules, etc.

Please let me know your thoughts
#channeladvisor #channelsale #mercent
  • Profile picture of the author Loridori4
    I'm searching for a service similar to ChannelSale as our business is expanding rapidly. However, I didn't see anything about inventory managment on the Channesale site.

    I checked into Channel Advisor this past week...pass on them. They have a lot of negative feedback online.

    I'm looking at Bright Pearl, Seller Vantage and Monsoon.

    Reply here if you've chosen a company to work with..and let me know how it's going!
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    LA Minerals

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    • Profile picture of the author Silas Hart
      Cross platform management is so incredibly important that in the long run, I ended up paying a company to program what I needed. However, I didn't use datafeeds provided from dropshippers and had to create my own database of scrapped content and manage the data on my own sites, eBay, and Amazon. There was other solutions, such as ChannelAdvisor but with the $6000+ month I was paying them (although I have to admit their support is really good) - I found it financially feasible to create something more custom suited to my needs and in the end, I'm glad I did. I spent $30000 and I probably could have got my system for less than that but had already had two failed attempts at hiring outsourced developers and later decided to hire a company in the U.S.

      Mine also communicates with my inventory scanning system that runs on AS400, so that is probably an increased price you wont have to deal with since you are dropshipping.
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      • Profile picture of the author fmckinnon
        We actually went w/ ChannelAdvisor - it's a very long, slow integration for us because we have dozens of dropship feeds to manage. The mapping of the majority of fields is simple, but the thing that is taking so long is mapping all of our supplier categories (hundreds and hundreds) to the respective category taxonomy values required by all the other marketplaces.

        The biggest thing still missing; however, is true multi-sourced inventory management. ChannelAdvisor doesn't solve this problem at all, so every supplier's SKU imports as it's own SKU. This means for one product that is available from 6 suppliers, we may have 6 SKU for the same MPN/UPC Code product. There's no way to have one SKU that inherits available qty and best price logic from multiple distribution centers.

        If I could pay $30K to have that in my hands, and it worked efficiently, it would be worth it!

        So, that's the next piece of the puzzle for us - eventually, having one unique SKU per product, and when that product is avail from multiple distributors, having the qty and price inherited, and then sending one consolidated inventory feed into ChannelAdvisor, or whatever other marketplace integration platform is your choice.

        We are learning through over a year of R&D that even if you get the inventory management issue I described above resolved -- it's still risky when dropshipping. Say your system inherits 10 units and $100 price from Supplier #1 because they have best price ... but by the time your product sells and you return to dropship from Supplier #1, they are sold out, forcing you to cancel, or source from Supplier #2 at a higher price. That's really no different than what happens already, though ...

        Bottom line --- not having physical possession of the inventory makes it very tricky. From what I'm being told, these pain points are experienced by everyone who hasn't spent the bucks to build their own system. Then again, I've not heard of ANYONE who built such a system for $30K!? (more like $300K) --- Silas, what exactly does that system accomplish?
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        • Profile picture of the author serpyre
          Originally Posted by fmckinnon View Post

          The biggest thing still missing; however, is true multi-sourced inventory management. ChannelAdvisor doesn't solve this problem at all, so every supplier's SKU imports as it's own SKU. This means for one product that is available from 6 suppliers, we may have 6 SKU for the same MPN/UPC Code product. There's no way to have one SKU that inherits available qty and best price logic from multiple distribution centers.
          The solution we use has all this for multichannel marketplaces but it starts at $4k/mth, although it was designed by SAP architects so you would expect it to. We have drag-drop between master categories and the marketplace categories, it's fully automated from there but that really comes under onboarding. The nice thing is that the integration is based on the same that Walmart uses - scalability is not its problem!

          The problem with price/pick/pack routing is the complexity in the combinations - you really need to work on harmonised pricing. So on a business process level, how would you model the combinations to choose the supplier to route the orders to. We understand in a $billion business - but for a $multi-million company it would not have the resources to keep the routing logic in sync.
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    • Profile picture of the author MSYourluxworld
      also i want to know details.
      Originally Posted by Loridori4 View Post

      I'm searching for a service similar to ChannelSale as our business is expanding rapidly. However, I didn't see anything about inventory managment on the Channesale site.

      I checked into Channel Advisor this past week...pass on them. They have a lot of negative feedback online.

      I'm looking at Bright Pearl, Seller Vantage and Monsoon.

      Reply here if you've chosen a company to work with..and let me know how it's going!
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  • Profile picture of the author garyisonline
    The benefit of Channel Advisor is definitely for mapping the data of one single sku to multiple marketplaces very quickly. But if you're dropshipping, any inventory management with or without Channel Advisor is going to be a nightmare <--that's a given of the industry.

    Just as a thought:

    It seems you are importing directly from multiple suppliers' data feeds...which is one way of doing it, I guess. But doing it that way your inventory SKU's are supplier dependent. YIKES! Dropship suppliers have a way of getting weird...and some tend to vanish without notice. I'd rather not anchor my business systems (especially SKU's) to a supplier.

    Can you instead develop your own SKU system and attach each SKU to one single MPN. MPN data is always the same, title, descriptions, pictures etc. (You could also attach your SKU to UPC if MPN isn't consistent or available.)

    Then you can have your single unique SKU attach to all of its suppliers in the same item by way of Labels in Channel Advisor. You can attach the SKU to supplier #1's Label with the inventory representing their live level (if you know it). Then when they run out...switch it to supplier #2's Label and have the inventory level representing their live level?

    You can also create an Attribute and call it "Active Supplier", then you can have that field represent the current dropshipper(s).

    Again, I would only SKU by my own system attaching it to MPN or UPC right away. 1 million SKU's (a bunch of which are duplicate MPNs) would eat me alive! I don't need the importing of individual dropship feeds to muck my data all up.

    With Channel Advisor spreadsheets you can quickly update inventory levels and other supplier updates (pricing etc) for each of your SKUs in an external spreadsheet by using formulas and VLOOKUPS against the supplier's data feed but doing it externally. Then upload the updates back into Channel Advisor to roll live with that new data.

    Just spit-ballin'
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    • Profile picture of the author fmckinnon
      Thanks for your response, Gary.

      Creating our own SKU system is definintely on the roadmap. I've learned; however, that you can't create it solely by MPN ... once you have enough SKU, you discover that some MPNs repeat --- so you can have a $1K computer with the same MPN as a $.50 cable from another manufacturer. To really get it right, the SKU would have to be named by a combination of MPN/UPC/Manufacturer name match. Easier said than done, though I'd love to see it happen.

      I got lost when you started talking about attaching labels and having the labels coming on/off depending on supplier's qty, etc. Not sure how to make that happen, but sounds like a creative idea.

      The external vloookups, etc ... that gets scary to me for three reasons:
      1) I don't know how to do it (although I do have someone who eats and breathes Excel and knows how to build that kind of thing)
      2) the frequency needed to be doing this 24/7 every few hours (yes, available inventory and pricing can change that quickly) makes it seem unrealistic
      3) manual editing in Excel and human intervention at that level scares me because I've been that guy who erroneously sorted or did something and uploaded an update that caused a massive mess! :-)

      I'd much rather it be automated or done w/o my involvement. Perhaps it's easier than it sounds, though.
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  • Profile picture of the author wakeforce139
    Hey Guys.

    I had the same problem and like Silas I went the custom route and had my own system developed. The amount of money you have to spend every month is insane. Out of problems arise opportunities though and my programmer and I decided to take the solution to market. Having been on the selling side of ecommerce for over 5 years, I know what we want and what we need to get our products listed in all of the marketplaces and CSEs, etc.

    If you want to cut your costs, get rid of the confusion surrounding your product listings, and focus on the selling let me know. We're a small team of 3-5 (I outsource to 2 extra people when needed) and we only take on a limited number of clients but we have room for 3 or 4 new customers. Let me know if you are interested and we can discuss your needs further. Message here or add me on Skype: wakeforce139.
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    • Profile picture of the author Kiboko
      Take a look at this site - reviews all the potential services.....I am working with smartfeed now. Too early to comment.

      Onewayshopping.com &ndash; Partners
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      Yes, without proper traffic, its zero leads, its zero sales. This is the Number 1 Problem that stops 97% of marketers dead in their tracks - lack of TRAFFIC.

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      • Profile picture of the author fmckinnon
        I got an offer from them the other day about listing my products on their portal (like a CSE) ... but nothing about data feed management.

        I have used GoDataFeed, SingleFeed, etc ... good services if you already have one consolidated feed to begin with. Our pain points is in getting the inventory from tons of suppliers consolidated and dealing with multi-source SKU.
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  • Profile picture of the author repricerexpress
    You could run your queries by our sister company SellerExpress—the guys on support would be able to quickly advise if the software is a good fit and if any bespoke work could be accommodated.
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    Amazon repricing software that helps you win the Buy Box more often. eBay repricing also available.
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  • Profile picture of the author Solid Commerce
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    • Profile picture of the author Alister@Vanquish
      @fmckinnon - "Our pain points is in getting the inventory from tons of suppliers consolidated and dealing with multi-source SKU".

      That part is relatively straightforward as we already developed a solution which is similar to Heiler but scalable from SMEs upwards - we haven't released it as it is being used by a VC for their commerce sites. Basically supplier mapping with zero code in 30mins similar to Walmart - but without the $100s thousands implementation costs.

      The part we have not yet done is bring the data conversion processes together to feed the datasets to multiple channels. We have the technology, just not the use case at the moment which deals will all the touchpoints.

      We already have a product and inventory manager which acts as the master and then feeds out to the commerce solutions - handling multi-warehouse and multi-supplier single sku. The other part missing is the best-price use case, that becomes more complex.
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  • Profile picture of the author steveburns
    Hi. I have been using ChannelSale for a year and a half now and am quite happy with their services. Yes. They do offer quality integration solutions with all the platforms you mentioned and they do offer superior support solutions for Newegg as well. I can see that you are looking for Amazon repricing solutions also in which ChannelSale excels (this is my firsthand experience). Consolidated and integrated inventory management solutions from ChannelSale are not just super effective but very affordable as well. I love the fact that ChannelSale solutions are very quick to implement as compared with many other e commerce solution providers. And yes... the managed solutions are chalked in a way that they can keep pace with growing ventures. Considering the fact that this company is very affordable, you can always give it a shot. All the best
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    • Profile picture of the author 6NtW2GsIOC31D8
      Originally Posted by steveburns View Post

      Hi. I have been using ChannelSale for a year and a half now and am quite happy with their services. Yes. They do offer quality integration solutions with all the platforms you mentioned and they do offer superior support solutions for Newegg as well. I can see that you are looking for Amazon repricing solutions also in which ChannelSale excels (this is my firsthand experience). Consolidated and integrated inventory management solutions from ChannelSale are not just super effective but very affordable as well. I love the fact that ChannelSale solutions are very quick to implement as compared with many other e commerce solution providers. And yes... the managed solutions are chalked in a way that they can keep pace with growing ventures. Considering the fact that this company is very affordable, you can always give it a shot. All the best
      I hope you like ChannelSale since it looks like you may be an employee.
      https://www.facebook.com/channelsale...utions?fref=ts
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