Rithum is a commerce network that helps brands, suppliers, and retailers work together to deliver connected e-commerce experiences. The Rithum platform helps brands and retailers accelerate growth, optimize channel operations, and scale product offerings.
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ZiftONE
Score 9.2 out of 10
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Zift Solutions Through Partner Marketing Automation Platform is a suite of applications meant to streamline interactions with channel partners, amplify demand, and ease cooperation on co-branded campaigns.
I have learned my lesson and will never deal with ChannelAdvisor again. I am madder that I wasted a year of my life over this. I should have researched more, but they pushed me harder and harder to sign up.
Our brand is growing online at a rapid clip, and we wanted a platform that would scale accordingly. The feature that really sold us was the automatic workflows. If we want a certain type of product that's going to a customer in a certain state to ship a certain way, we could …
Solid Commerce started out as a good company to start multi-channel selling, but its customer service and tool really fell apart over time. We became extremely disappointed with the lack of reliability, functionality and frustrating customer service. It is the tool we used …
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 …
This is the only product that I have used that does what ChannelAdvisor does. I have used Wordpress and Drupal e-commerce sites. ChannelAdvisor is very different from a typical e-commerce CMS.
I have no experience with any other products so I honestly cannot say. What I do know is that most fortune 100 companies in ecommerce use ChannelAdvisor and that speaks greatly for their product. They also have been around longer than any other vendor so I trust …
Infopia - CA was definitely more robust but more difficult to use. Infopia is out of business now but it was very competitive with them for a brief period of time.
ZiftONE
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose ZiftONE
We were also testing the HubSpot Marketing Hub platform at the same time I began utilizing ZiftONE. ZiftONE's data is more reliable than HubSpot, thus we've decided to use it as a backup for systems that need content syndication. However, GetResponse's sales funnel is easier to …
At the same time that I started using ZiftONE, we worked in a test mode with the GetResponse platform. We select ZiftONE as support on platforms that require content syndication since the information it provides us is more accurate than that of GetResponse. However, GetResponse …
Zift is much easier to use than other products we've used. With Zift you have more options and features that are much more beneficial. It also keeps all your information organized and ready to go at any time. Other products don't do this as well. Also, customer care is much …
Honestly, we used Zift because it was free to us for the network we are a part of. However, we will still use it even without that network because of the ease of using it and the price. I Feel it gets everything done that we need it to. Great program.
SFDC - What can be said, SFDC is an industry leader in so many ways and it's add-on and plug-ins can connect to most anything. Even though my company uses SFDC, the biggest reasons were a) cost of adding users to the front end, and b) flexibility without jumping head first into …
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.
Overall Relayware is a great product. It's many features in a single package lend itself well for working with partners be that channel partners, direct sales, VARs, indirect sales, or most any other type of partner. With the flexible construction and licensing you can activate the parts of Relayware you want and then easily grow the functionality as your partner management needs grow. This is a very nice solution versus adding additional SaaS systems and spending considerables hours building API connectors. That said, Relayware does have a robust API should you need to connect to other systems. There is native support for SSO connectivity, SFDC (Salesforce.com) and a handful of other third party products. Where you might not want to use Relayware is if it's too big for your organization, so like any SaaS, do your research, talk to Relayware, and evaluate the product. The many features and ability to handle lots of partners definitely adds complexity and comes with a decent, but fair, price tag. So, if you're a small organization just starting out with a few partners, or you have very simple partner management needs, Relayware might not be for you. Then again, it may, since I've found it easy to use several of the product's features beyond just working with partners. So again, evaluate, and draw your own conclusions.
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.
Partner tracking and communication - Relayware allows a holistic view of a partner. Since the tool tracks everything a user does, you can easily see when the partner has sent or received emails, participated in trainings, download files, etc. You can also see how and when back-office users such as admins, partner managers, etc. have communicated with partners, updated dashboards, downloaded reports, and much more. The granularity of the history and tracking is exception for seeing how you and a partner are engaging. It's also very helpful for companies who require an audit trail for activities.
Training/eLearning/onboarding - I've worked with a number of eLearning/LMS platforms over the years and I'm stunned by the learning system built into Relayware. It's hands down far and above many existing standalone products and if Relayware was smart, they would offer this as a standalone item. The system supports the typical eLearning/LMS basics- SCORM support, grading, training by module, etc. but it also allows for custom training paths based on learning modules which can be SCORM, video, HTML, files, and any combination of these. The grading system is separated from the training content which allows for highly flexible user cases. You can created quizzes, tests, and certifications based on individual content modules or a full learning path.
Since the LMS is part of the overall Relayware system which is intended for partner management, you can create a range of onboarding processes/paths which are customized to particular types of partners. The system can support both online and offline activities so you can require xxx to be done online, followed by in-person training, etc. It really is an impressive system. I liked it so much, I decomissioned my instance of a Moodle LMS and I now use the Relayware LMS to serve as both partner eLearning and general customer eLearning through a separate portal.
Flexibility - It's hard to believe the Relayware can do so much in a single SaaS. The system allows for connection to SFDC so working leads and opportunities is simple. A manager or admin can add, edit, and remove web pages with ease. Data can be placed on any webpage using a number of "Relayware tags" which are special HTML tags to pull data from the system and use on a page. Customizable workflows for most any part of the system can be handled via a workflow engine. This could be onboarding, partner signup and registration, lead/deal/opportunity management and routing to appropriate users, Legal and Export compliance checking of documents and files, and on and on.
The only real drawback is that the system is so flexible, it helps to have good training and support so you don't get lost. Luckily this is only an issue for those who administer the system and Relayware is keen to provide good support for their product.
Licensing & cost - My observation is that Relayware has several good options for licensing and overall cost. They break the system down into several key modules so if you don't need something, you can remove it and not pay for it. However, that also makes it easy for the product to grow as your needs do. One of their license modules is by back-office users, not front-office. The benefit of this is when coupled with SFDC, you only need a single SFDC license for all of your field personnel and front end users. Since one of the Relayware models is to not charge by the number of front end users, you can save thousands in SFDC licenses. Ie: A user works through Relayware to report/edit/manage leads, deals, and opportunities. The system uses a single SFDC license to connect to SFDC so rather than every front end user needing an SFDC license, you only need one. Depending on the size of your organization, this alone could easily pay for the Relayware system.
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.
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
We were also testing the HubSpot Marketing Hub platform at the same time I began utilizing ZiftONE. ZiftONE's data is more reliable than HubSpot, thus we've decided to use it as a backup for systems that need content syndication. However, GetResponse's sales funnel is easier to use for those who are new to a software of this kind. ZiftONE ensures that our campaigns are being managed with the right information and that our products and services are being promoted to the right audience. This medium is useful for spreading your brand's name around and may even yield a few leads.
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.
