Hi Forum Readers,
We use ESellerPro at our company and I thought I'd share our experience with you.
Our reasons for using it are really to allow us to hook into a number of different sales channels, and manage the inventory across all these channels, optimise pricing and sales, optimise the customer experience.
Our strategy for growth is to sell our products across more and more online channels, both in the UK and overseas and launch our products across niche sites that appeal to different groups. e.g. wholesale versus retail and also breaking down retail into various niches.
We used to use an in-house system that wasn't integrated into the X Cart website we used and ebay and amazon channels were managed clunkily using spreadsheets or if in a hurry to make a change, through sellercentral.
We went live on ESellerPro early in 2009 with the solution using integration into one of our websites running on XCart. Our long term intention is to use the website platform offered by ESP as this allows for tighter integration for inventory and the ability to rollout sites and new channels very quickly and manageably. At the moment we're nervous about the impact on SEO of changing web platform.
We later added the amazon.co.uk channel and ebay.co.uk and are currently in the process of adding amazon.com as a channel. We don't do CDs and books so channels like play etc are not useful for us at present.
We also have added in fulfilment by Royal Mail, so orders come in and get pushed across to the fulfilment centre once checked for pick,pack and sending. The next step for us is to automate this so we only have to deal with exceptions.
We are going to add in accounting integration next. We added the system in gradually one step at a time from a risk management perspective.
The other benefit is that we have recently got some part time people to help with answering phone inquiries from a different location. Being web based, these people can enter phone orders and charge customer cards from a different location. We also use the voipfone.co.uk service for the calls. which works brilliantly.
Costs
We justified the charges based on time saved. I am from an IT background and I realise both the complexity of doing this in house and keeping up with changes in interfaces to different channels and the time factor involved and would rather spend this time looking for new products and new channels.
I think the setup fees are very reasonable considering the labour time involved. The monthly fees also are less than what we would have to pay to hire the extra person we would need, or the opportunity cost of doing it ourselves. Whether I will think that when our turnover is considerable will be another matter further down the line!
It's also worth mentioning that the extra channels brought on board have more than paid for this with the increase in sales which is not bad in the middle of a recession!
Now, when we add a new SKU, we add it in ESP and very quickly push it out to other channels. We don't have to reformat to suit and there are more tools to automate listings that we haven't even touched the surface of yet.
It's worth also mentioning why I haven't mentioned our company name. I thought about this and I think the use of this software is a real competitive advantage for us, so I don't like the idea of our competitors using the same software, which I guess is the ultimate compliment!
I'm happy to answer any specific questions that anyone has via email however.
I think software like ESellerPro and ChannelAdvisor can really help take away all the grunt out of running a multi-channel business. If costs are a real concern, you could probably put together some integration using 3rd party products to pull in orders from websites and then use macros or custom code to reformat your database to push out to multiple channels but you can spend a lot of time doing this and dealing with multiple vendors can be a nightmare.
I like the thought of being able to log a support ticket for a new channel and have it looked at and get back to running my business which is where my time is more valuable.
When considering a solution I would look at what channels are supported and ask for some customers for testimonials. I actually ordered a product from a company using ESEellerPro to see what the experience was like!
Since going live our ebay rating has moved to 100% partly because of our great warehouse managed by Royal Mail Fulfilment and partly because of ESellerPro and our amazon feedback consists of mostly 5 out of 5's so something is working!
Happy integrating!
