There have been rumours flying around the industry regarding ChannelAdvisor and today I spoke to CEO Scot Wingo for the full story.
Over the last two years ChannelAdvisor have made several acquisitions (Marketworks, RichFX). The International offices have been run as separate entities but will now be integrated into the main corporate structure. The restructure will affect about 20% of employees worldwide.
International expansion is key to ChannelAdvisor’s success. Scot spoke of the importance of the UK saying “The UK is one of fastest growing markets and we will continue to invest there.” There will be training investment in the global sales team to enable them to provide new applications such as RichFX media offerings in the near future.
For customers the restructure is good news, there will be a new product release in September along with incremental changes and support for the new 30 day eBay listings. A new ChannelAdvisor Complete console will allow sellers to manage all their multiple applications, from eBay sales to Google Adwords, from one user interface.
ChannelAdvisor have just received $20m in what’s expected to be their last round of investment needed to break even. As a Software-as-a-Service company their income is reliant on growing their user base and today they report revenues are up 55% year on year so the business is in good shape for the future. ChannelAdvisor have focused on growing revenues but will now look to streamline operations and cut expenses as they push towards profitability.
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Don’t forget that you can meet the guys from Channel Advisor and hear about their plans and changes at Small Business 2.0.
https://www.smallbusiness20.co.uk
James Scott will be speaking on the ecommerce landscape: alway worth listening to.
I would use channel advisor in a crack, if it were subscription based rather than percentage based
there missing out on a significant minority of sellers that sell single items
Well thats more than he has told his customers….
Some very well know and much loved faces from the UK offices have been made redundant!
Nice!
I haven’t seen any news about this on the CA discussion forum, maybe they just don’t want to talk about it. I assume we are talking about rationalising their stucture after their acquisitions, which would make sense.
Well, what Wingo says to you and what is the truth are way apart. Wingo has gone on a spending spree in the last 12 months that his pocket could not handle. He had now sacked staff around the world and get this, hasn’t even paid them their correct payouts. Staff were ’emailed’ their terminations, he didn’t even talk to them. Four vice presidents, gone, they knew the real trouble CA is headed for. Up until the end of 2007 the whole financials were done world wide on excel! Lets face it, look at their credit history, they have run purely on venture capital and when they were having problems securing their capital they chopped heads. They did not pay suppliers, they did not pay staff they terminated. Wingo, likes bright shiny new toys, Michael Jones his crutch is just as bad. I would warn anyone to think twice about this house of cards, having in the last 8 months losing 80% of their senior management for ‘personal reasons’ says something about a company!