Complaint Review: Channel Advisor - Richmond Other

ChannelAdvisor a waste of time and money. AU$11,440+ wasted.

After being so very careful when dealing with cold call companies for many years I unfortunately succumbed to the expert sales techniques used by Channel Advisor.

The staff I believe are professional and highly inteligent. However, here is where this company falls very short of the mark. After requesting to use the marketing service that was on offer, I was coerced into accepting the "paid search" option of the service Channel Advisor platform with the  belief that it would be managed by Channel Advisor. One week into discussing the service with our account manager we understood that our technologies where incompatible. I reviewed the Australian contract law to request a stay on our arrangement until our technology would be compatible.

Channel Advisor's response, you may guess the result, the introduction of the global legal team. Yes, within less than a week and with what i thought was goodwill from the local branch, our request to place a stay or termination of our account was DENIED. My belief is to work with the cards that you are dealt, so we incorporated an additioinal premium service to aid our service to be of some use. An additional $880 was inccurred for premium account assistance which led to nothing more than once again a waste of time and money.

We found ourselves locked into a contract for $880 a month for 12 months for a service that was not being provided. Despite a great ammount of work being performed from our end to make this venture work. As this company was American based, a great number of the features within the paid search actually worked against our company. Another blind side was that after working with the company, I received an email from Google mentioning/threatening that the ads created by ChannelAdvisor were in breach of trademark usage. Something I have never come across myself until the introduction of their service.

With the number of brands that we carry entering into the hundreds we carry we now found that our completely functional and terrific Adwords account was now in jeopardy of being banned. Channel Advisor response was to go back to the lay use of uncategorised, unbranded creation of paid search terms! Thank you but this i could have managed from our end. We had also been advised to cancel our existing account and pass all of our budget towards the channel advisor campaign. lol. The whole encounter has been a waste of time, a waste of investment and the unfortunate creation of a great deal of frustration.

In brief this is what we encountered.

- Incompatible technologies making the use of the system redundant

- Legal bullying with regards to contractual agreement within the first week of signing.

- Googles implementation of Dynamic product placement making the failed channel advisor service redundant.

- Ads created by Channel advisor where succinctly banned by Google.  

- Poor Ad creation and an incomprehension of keyword or product placement strategy. 

- 12 months of no service despite additional payments being made to use the service.

- Very poor leadership within this highly profitable area.

Our goal was to use the Channel advisor platform to create a strong SEO relationship with all of our thousands of products that are present on our site. The end result, No Service for an exorbitant price backed up by a globally agressive legal team unrelated to the realities of a failed service.

Thank you Channel Advisor. I will be more than happy to advise others of leading technologies and practice that will make your service redundant. Any chance I get, I will steer potential clients away from your service as you have proven to be impractical, a disgraceful company to work with and a dying platform.

Yours Truly,