Simon Clarkson, Managing Director, ChannelAdvisor
With the advent of digitalization, the e-commerce world has changed the overall shopping experience. People can buy a range of products from any corner of the world. Consumer shopping habits have changed drastically over the last few years due to the explosion of e-commerce. While shopping in a store was once the predominant way to shop, online shopping is quickly becoming the preferred way to shop for consumers across the world. People prefer e-commerce as it gives consumers access to information, the ability to shop using any device at any time, and the option to share their expectations and the way they shop.
ChannelAdvisor is a leading e-commerce cloud platform whose mission is to connect and optimize the world’s growing e-commerce. For nearly two decades, ChannelAdvisor has helped brands and retailers worldwide improve their online performance by expanding sales channels, connecting with consumers around the world, optimizing their operations for peak performance, and providing actionable analytics to improve competitiveness. Thousands of customers depend on ChannelAdvisor to securely power their sales and optimize fulfillment on channels such as Amazon, eBay, Google, Facebook, Walmart, and hundreds more.
The Inception of the Company
ChannelAdvisor was founded by two industry veterans, Scot Wingo and Aris Buinevicius, in 2007 to help companies sell on eBay, an auction-oriented marketplace. The founding team realized that brands and retailers were using marketplaces to reach new customers, promote new products and sell excess inventory. So they created a solution to help make these activities easier. Since that time, the marketplaces model has grown significantly and ChannelAdvisor has added additional capabilities to help brands and retailers take advantage of opportunities in e-commerce. The company has been a software as a service (SaaS) company from the beginning.
As the company expanded e-commerce services beyond support for eBay sellers, ChannelAdvisor launched support for Amazon in its early days as a marketplace and continues to integrate with new marketplaces globally, including eBay, Amazon, Lazada, Tmall, Walmart, CDiscount, Otto, Zalando, Mercado Libre, Wish, and Ali Express.
Simon Clarkson, Managing Director APAC, ChannelAdvisor, explains the strategy behind the company’s marketplace integrations, “Competition is fierce and everyone in this space must adapt and continue to evolve. As we navigate the exciting new developments in the e-commerce landscape, ChannelAdvisor is proud to be a trusted partner for our customers.”
The company has also integrated with numerous retailer drop-ship programs for many brands. At an early stage, the company recognized that the product data feeds were important for e-commerce advertising and created a product feed management solution. In addition to that, it also added solutions to manage paid search and social advertising, connect a brand’s consumers with their retail partners via shoppable ads, and enable connections between their platform and fulfillment solutions. In a nutshell, the company has grown into a comprehensive multi-channel e-commerce platform.
One-Stop Platform
ChannelAdvisor is a one-stop platform that offers a centralized solution to help guide brands and retailers streamline their marketing, sales, and fulfillment. This comprehensive platform collects products and inventory data from the customers and helps them optimize performance across hundreds of channels. The orders and performance information flowing through the ChannelAdvisor system can provide actionable analytics and enable better decision making for customers.
In the e-commerce industry, it is very important to have consistent, quality product content. ChannelAdvisor helps to transform and optimize product content for the unique requirements of each endpoint, whether it is a marketplace or a digital marketing channel. The platform can help prevent out-of-stock issues by synchronizing inventory across all channels. The company’s reprising and competitive analytics help improve the ability of marketplace sellers to compete, while its Digital Marketing team strives to increase product visibility for advertisers across dozens of channels, including Amazon, Google, Facebook, and more.
Helping Clients Overcome Challenges
A significant challenge facing brands and retailers is the ability to adapt to consumer behavior on multiple channels. Some of the common needs of businesses include expanding to new channels, managing product listings across channels, increasing visibility to attract new customers, optimizing e-commerce strategy, and strengthening brand and retailer relationships.
ChannelAdvisor helps brands and retailers sell their products across multiple marketplaces and digital marketing channels through a single, unified platform. Through its established integrations with leading global channels such as Amazon, eBay, Google, Facebook, Walmart, Newegg, Lazada and others, the company offers customized solutions to help brands and retailers enhance their e-commerce performance by diversifying their selling channels, developing effective pricing and advertising strategies, obtaining competitive insights, streamlining inventory management and order fulfillment and creating a frictionless buyer experience at every stage of the shopping journey.
ChannelAdvisor’s Future Plans to Redefine E-Commerce
E-commerce is constantly evolving. Changes in consumer behavior and buying habits, innovations in technology, and shifts in retail landscapes require sellers to be vigilant and resourceful. “Our goal is to help brands and retailers flourish in a changing e-commerce environment. Our customers’ success is our success,” asserts, Clarkson. “We put the right communication and technology in place to ensure that we are aligned with our customers’ goals and expectations.” Also, the team at ChannelAdvisor prioritizes communication with clients through regular touchpoints to further understand objectives and promote progress in meeting those goals successfully.
At ChannelAdvisor, the main focus is to remain innovative and agile at the front lines of e-commerce to support brands and retailers now and in the future. “As an e-commerce leader, we will continue to invest in our technology and our people to offer solutions to propel our customers to greater success through the next phases of our industry,” concludes Mr. Clarkson.