TrustRadius Insights for Rithum are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Recommendations
Based on user reviews, there are three common recommendations for CONTEXT. Users suggest conducting thorough research to find a Product Information Management (PIM) system that aligns with the specific needs of their business. It is also advisable to plan ahead and clean up internal catalogs before utilizing the software. Additionally, users recommend investing in training for as many employees as possible during onboarding to maximize success with the software. If support is of utmost importance, exploring cheaper full-service options available is suggested. These recommendations highlight important considerations such as thorough research, advance preparation, and investment in employee training and support for a successful experience with CONTEXT.
In my opinion, you should save your time and money by choosing Zentail, or at the very least, Sellbrite. From my experience, ChannelAdvisor's salesmen will lie to you and tell you whatever you want to hear. Once they have you signed up for a contract then they have access to your bank account. In my case, they took money out twice more than necessary, with no notice or explanation. I was not able to get anyone on the phone and received no responses to my emails. Onboarding took double the time they told me and I was not able to just list a new product on my own.
Cons
Customer service
Billing
Listing on Amazon
Likelihood to Recommend
I had a project manager from ChannelAdvisor yell at me on a Zoom call. They switch you from person to person, so from my experience, nothing fully gets done. Additionally, I feel the cost is never the cost. Even if you give them written notice of cancellation they will delay it in order to keep charging you.
I would advise reading any contracts with ChannelAdvisor carefully. In my experience, they took 7 months and couldn't get the implementation
done. In my experience, we were 7 months into the contract and we were not live but still charged service fees.
Pros
I believe they are signing contracts that cannot be fulfilled
I believe they are incompetent and understaffed leading to incomplete jobs
Cons
I believe they should get better-skilled personnel
In my view, their monthly service charge should start upon going live.
Likelihood to Recommend
They had good reputation in the past. They now care about their stock prices and not their customers, in my opinion. They need to improve their technical team to support their own platform, I believe.
ChannelAdvisor allows us to easily post our listings on marketplaces, track inventory, dropship with other manufacturers, provide a great marketing ads console, create business rules when creating listings, and provide sales reporting. ChannelAdvisor saves us tons of time by posting to all marketplaces and houses all of our listings in one easy-to-manage place.
Pros
Listing products on marketplaces
Saving order information
Easy-to-use ads console
Great reporting capabilities
Easy-to-update product listing
Connects with many different platforms
Cons
Does not integrate well with Big Commerce
Does not have a seamless returns process
Amazon listings tend to have lots of issues
Likelihood to Recommend
ChannelAdvisor is great for a company that is looking to list on different marketplaces and store all inventory in one place. It is not appropriate for smaller companies just looking to sell on their own ecommerce platform. The one drawback is it is quite the investment, but it has helped us grow our business tremendously.
I use this portal to download packing slips so I can enter orders. I upload inventory so the store knows what we have on hand. And I enter tracking information that is passed on to the customer. It also allows me to track how many orders I have received at any given time.
Pros
User friendly
The features are simple.
Can get a lot of information in one place
Cons
When closing out orders, I wish it could sort by product.
Likelihood to Recommend
CommerceHub is suited for my business needs as it is all e-commerce customers who order 1-2 items. During this COVID pandemic, my orders that used to be 40 per day are now 300-400 a day so this portal is not working well for me due to all the manual entering I have to do. And since I can’t sort by product it takes really long to close out orders.
We use ChannelAdvisor as the primary Order Management System (OMS) for our flagship brand of tungsten. ChannelAdvisor is hands down the Cadillac solution in the OMS industry. We use it across the full organization in operations, marketing, e-commerce, and information technology. ChannelAdvisor aggregates all of our orders, sends them to our shipping partners, and sends the transactions to Quickbooks.
Pros
Incredible workflow automation.
One click easy integration with various e-commerce platforms.
Beautiful user interface that allows for quick on-boarding.
Cons
Super expensive.
When there's a glitch, prepare to call IT since it's not an easy fix.
Fixed contracts. If Amazon decides to ban you from their platform, there's a huge risk in having to continue paying.
Likelihood to Recommend
Are you an enterprise level e-commerce merchandise marketer with a full IT team and a giant budget? This product is absolutely for you. Automate workflows based on conditional logic, support a blue-chip brand, and make the information technology team happy with two-factor authentication security. If you can pay for it, this is the product that will make everybody happy.
It helps us sell on Amazon, Amazon Prime, Amazon FBA, eBay, Walmart, Google Express, and Big Commerce. It is our filter to the marketplaces. It is being used in the e-commerce division of the company only and it solved many problems and streamlined processes the predecessor could not.
Pros
Allows for multiple pricing options.
Is the communication conduit to the marketplaces.
Allows us to sort, filter add attributes, and organize our inventory.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
I believe this tool could be recommended to an e-commerce team looking to grow quickly in the number of SKUs and in the number of marketplaces they wish to sell with. I do feel it's a bit beyond the need of your side job, "sell-at-night" small e-commerce company.
We use Channel Advisor for both SEM and selling on Marketplaces. The ability to populate ads and listings across multiple marketplaces and search venues from a single, central, item listing is crucial to our success. It vastly reduces the manpower necessary to achieve a high saturation level of marketing presence for a large number of products. This solution is used in a single department - that being responsible for online advertising.
Pros
Scales very well - able to handle thousands of product listings with no lag.
Constantly implementing new marketplaces.
Stays up to date with all changes to marketplace templates and SEM revisions.
Cons
Would love to see integration with even more marketplaces.
Reporting could use some improvement.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
We use ChannelAdvisor primarily for optimizing our raw inventory feeds for numerous online marketplaces, including Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Newegg, Rakuten, Sears and Shop.com. Additionally, we do the same with several digital marketing feeds like Google, Bing and Yahoo! Gemini as well as other miscellaneous flex feeds. Historically, the ChannelAdvisor platform has always fallen under the control of our acquisition marketing team (typically 2-3 people). However, several other members from Customer Service, Tech and Business Intelligence departments are also in the system from time to time. All in all, ChannelAdvisor helps simplify and expedite the product feed management process through sophisticated, yet easy-to-understand automation.
Pros
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.
Cons
Customer Support: Unfortunately ChannelAdvisor does not currently provide a phone number for their support team. Everything is done strictly through email. While you can submit support tickets with "urgent" or "high priority" settings, response is almost always a little lackadaisical. It would amazing if they had a direct line to call or chat feature to make solving technical issues more efficient.
Training/Strategy Resources: Don't get me wrong, ChannelAdvisor provides plenty of resources to educate users on its platform. It may be personal preference, but the organizational layout seems a little outdated and not as easy-to-navigate as its normal user interface.
Optimization History Log: Battling feed errors in ChannelAdvisor tends to happen a lot. It would be great to have some sort of change history log for users to reference when optimizing feeds. In my experience, it's tough to pinpoint which changes in particular actually solved or caused an issue to occur.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you manage over 25,000 child skus across dozens of different marketplaces and digital marketing networks, ChannelAdvisor can greatly simplify the process. In my case, it's just not scalable to manually optimize that many products and websites. We need a platform like ChannelAdvisor to provide process automation. Obviously, the fewer skus you manage and the fewer websites you sell on, the greater your ability will be to manage them on your own. But in the interest of growing your business, ChannelAdvisor can help take it to the next level.
I am a web developer and I had a contract project working with ChannelAdvisor. The client had a "basic web store" and wanted to upgrade to the "premium web store" product. This company used ChannelAdvisor exclusively to earn all revenue for online apparel it sells.
Pros
Organized complete inventory and distributed the products to multiple websites (ebay, amazon.com, google, etc)
Automatically created a catalog of inventory with nice looking theme that updates quantity as items are sold
Cons
Lack of customization, documentation, tutorials, support for the premium webstore
Lack of innovation. My client was told that the basic web store was being replace by the premium web store so they needed to upgrade. In my opinion the basic web store was actually much more flexible and robust than the premium web store. Now (it has been less than 2 years) they are making my client switch from the premium web store to "Shopify" and they are charging more money for this. My client was charged to upgrade each time and the process to upgrade was expensive, time consuming, and very convoluted. ChannelAdvisor needs to invest in their technology and migrate data for ChannelAdvisor changes technology. But the experience as an end user is very frustrating since the way of doing things keep changing and not always for the better result for the customer.
Channel Advisor needs better support. Help Desk, knowledge base, etc. there are a lot of things you can do with ChannelAdvisor but it is my experience that nothing is very straight forward and there are many different potential problems you will run into and ChannelAdvisor points the finger at "Google" or "Amazon" or "Ebay" instead of helping solve a problem from end to end.
It is quite expensive for what it does. I would not have advised my customer to use their product but they were so entrenched that they had no other choice.
Likelihood to Recommend
Shopify would be a better alternative. Why should you pay ChannelAdvisor and Shopify? I don't think ChannelAdvisor can deliver on their promise to be a complete e-commerce solution. ChannelAdvisor is best to stay focused on just distributing product on different channels (and not have your own web store at all).
VU
Verified User
Executive in Information Technology (1-10 employees)
We use it primarily to send our inventory to multiple platforms such as Amazon, eBay, Rakuten, Sears, Shop.com, etc. It also manages inventory for one of our webstores. In addition to inventory management, we also utilize it for our SEO/PPC campaigns on Google. Therefore, we do use it across multiple departments.
It gives us one, easy to use platform to control our inventory. If we did not use ChannelAdvisor, we would have to log into the backends of these marketplaces and doing manual editing and monitoring. This of course would involve a great deal of manpower to accomplish. ChannelAdvisor helps us keep our staff smaller and our business more automated.
One of the big perks of ChannelAdvisor is it's ability to monitor and reprice for competition on Amazon. This has been key to our success on Amazon.
Pros
Centralized and automated management of large inventories across multiple channels.
On the fly repricing of products on Amazon to help keep us competitive.
Intuitive feeds for Google shopping helping keep our products more visible.
Simple, easy to use interface
Knowledge and expertise in the field of online retail that they help all their users to understand.
Cons
Faster repricing on Amazon
Better technical support. Tickets often take far to long to be closed.
Fix bugs and glitches that often cause slowness using the software.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is well suited for anyone trying to sell their products across multiple marketplaces and websites. It helps cut down on employees and automate tasks that could take a person hours.
It is not well suited if you are only selling on your own website as it is really intended to be used for marketplaces.
