Musings on ChannelAdvisor and eBay
I read an interesting post yesterday from Randy Smythe entitled ‘10 Reasons Why eBay Will Eventually Acquire ChannelAdvisor‘.
I am always interested in acquisitions and business strategies, and I think this one makes sense. eBay will want to control buyers as well as sellers.
Their current tools (Turbolister is a good example) are geared for small time sellers. Looking back over the last 3 or so years as a volume seller on eBay, it is pretty clear that their toolset offering to sellers hasn’t really been geared for high volume, big business.
Selling Manager Pro is ok, and getting closer to what volume sellers want, but with the continuing effort of larger sellers to diversify off eBay they are looking for different products (like Marketworks and ChannelAdvisor) to better enable this.
We went down the path of developing our own SKU management and listing systems using eBay’s API, but in the end decided we were better off letting someone like ChannelAdvisor do the development for us so we could spend time developing the business for growth, and using their online store and multichannel selling capabilities.
Strategically eBay will want to
- Make it as easy as possible for sellers of all sizes to sell on eBay
- Make it easy for buyers to transact
- Take a piece of the pie, anyway they can
At the moment, eBay doesn’t have a robust inventory based listing tool like ChannelAdvisor to ’sell’ to larger buyers. With the recent acquisition of ‘AfterBuy‘ in Germany though, they are perhaps opening the veil to some of the strategic thinking.
Afterbuy is a similar product to CA, seemingly offering inventory management and product sales in various channels (I say seemingly because my German isn’t all that great…)
There will be more products on the horizon for eBay if they continue down this road, both locally and overseas, that fill ‘gaps’ in the selling and buying process.
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