ChannelAdvisor CEO Scot Wingo
eBay- and ecommerce-management firm ChannelAdvisor has formed a new technology group within the company called ChannelAdvisor Labs, charged with exploring innovative new technologies and products geared towards helping merchants sell more. ChannelAdvisor cofounder and CTO Aris Buinevicius will focus exclusively on leading the group.
ChannelAdvisor also introduced two beta offerings that the company says set the stage for future ChannelAdvisor Labs offerings. Customer Communication Center (C3) gives eBay sellers a hosted, software-as-a-service system for managing all of their messages from prospective and existing buyers/bidders. The service solves the problem of eBay's "yellow button" system that requires sellers to use eBay's "MyMessages" to answer email inquiries. Initially, there is no charge for the C3 beta and the program is open for all eBay merchants (http://ccc.channeladvisor.com).
ChannelAdvisor also introduced Direct2Search (D2S), which aggregates products for sale by ChannelAdvisor customers. D2S leverages the combined products to automate and optimize paid-search spend and enable the aggregation of merchants to spend more and achieve much higher results than they would individually. D2S is a pure pay-for-performance model for merchants (http://labs.channeladvisor.com/d2s).
D2S puts together customers' products in an index by category - for example, listings from several men's apparel merchants. ChannelAdvisor will then advertise using targeted keywords on Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN AdCenter, driving the traffic to those listings in a kind of "ChannelAdvisor Mall." Resulting transactions are completed on the merchant's ChannelAdvisor storefront. Merchants only pay the ChannelAdvisor commission, there are no listing fees, and ChannelAdvisor picks up the tab for the paid-search advertising.
Both C3 and D2S are beta offerings supported using online forums. C3 is available to US and UK based sellers. D2S is limited to existing US-based ChannelAdvisor customers.
http://labs.channeladvisor.com
