SmartShip by Qxpress vs. Rithum

Excellent for marketplace sellers with a lot of products - or those with a high turnover of SKUs. Not well suited to the small seller with only a few SKUs to promote. Also probably not suited to someone who only cares about a single marketplace. The real strength of it comes from managing multiple marketplaces through a single system.

Incentivized

• Complex, Yet Simple Navigational Interface: ChannelAdvisor is a beast, but navigating through their platform is relatively straightforward. The overall heirarchy is very well put together.
• One Feed to Rule Them All: With ChannelAdvisor, all we have to do is connect our inventory to their system once. Instead of having to construct and connect dozens of different product feeds to our internal inventory system, we simply connect to ChannelAdvisor and use the same single feed to build out all others' website templates.
• Product Mapping Made Easy: Mapping product attribute data across a multitude of unique online marketplaces and digital marketing sites can seem like a daunting task. ChannelAdvisor does a great job of simplifying this process, providing easy-to-understand and manage feed templates containing helpful descriptions and categorization.
• Business Rules and Lookup Lists: I use these all the time when "transforming" our raw inventory data to the specifications of any given feed. They are extremely helpful and super easy to build.
• Efficient Product Optimization: Instead of having to deal with the time-consuming task of making minute changes to thousands and thousands of skus, ChannelAdvisor allows you to automate these changes in a matter of minutes. It's much more scalable for our business.

Incentivized

• It is a seasoned system so you work with "tiers" of support.
• Our business rules seem too complicated for their system at times, needs the ability to ship by zone.
• It is not meant to be a shipping system. It's slow and does not have many advantages.

Incentivized

Without ChannelAdvisor, our business wouldn't be where it is today so the idea of NOT renewing is out of the question. By not renewing we would have to hire more employees and have more of a workload for existing employees. By keeping costs low and employees effecient we have been able to grow exponentially.

Better control of scope between the resources on both sides involved would allow for better change management.

Last year we looked into GoDataFeed as a result of some frustration with ChannelAdvisor's support team (plus we wanted to find some cheaper options). As much as I was looking for a reason to go with someone else, ChannelAdvisor simply holds too much of an edge when it comes to optimization and reporting features. In the end, the sophisticated, yet simple nature of ChannelAdvisor's platform outweighed less-than-ideal customer service. It also may have been the fact that we were already entirely set up and familiar with the ChannelAdvisor interface. Starting over just didn't make sense, and we really didn't have a reason to complain other than cost (which isn't terrible given our sales performance) and customer support

Incentivized

• Since my client has used ChannelAdvisor from the beginning, he has been satisfied with his ROI. The fees ChannelAdvisor costs him are quite confusing because it is a monthly fee, plus a percentage of each transaction, plus the fees from Amazon, Ebay, etc. and then he has the cost of the product and the cost of shipping. My client struggled to understand bottom line ROI but that is not the fault of ChannelAdvisor. I was shocked to see the kind of revenue he was able to generate but it appeared to me to be high volumes of transaction and lots of work and fees for very little ROI.