If you’re one of the 8,000 on-line retailers whose webshop is powered by ekmPowershop then ChannelGrabber have some interesting news for you. They have become the first multi-channel selling solution to integrate with ekmPowershop.
ChannelGrabber can now manage stock between can manage the stock between ekmPowershop, eBay, Amazon UK, Amazon DE and Amazon FR and when an order is placed on ekmPowershop, it will be automatically imported into Channelgrabber along with all orders from other channels.
You can update order statuses for ekmPowershopthrough Channelgrabber and dispatch all your orders including ekmPowershop orders through the one click dispatch on Channelgrabber. There is also support to have all your invoices printed on integrated labels.
Management platforms that can automatically list your stock on multiple marketplaces as well as your own website and remove the stock if you sell out on another site are almost essential for multi-channel retailing, so ChannelGrabber has just increased their attractiveness for retailers who already have an ekmPowershop website. At a flat fee of £50 per month and no contract ChannelGrabber is also reasonably priced.
An ekmPowershop costs £19.99 per month and is a fully hosted webstore solution again with no minimum contract length and 30 day money back guarantee.
37 Responses
I knew they were in talks with one another to sort a package out. Once my sales pick up a bit I’ll subcribe, but at the moment I can’t afford £50 a month. Paypal are doing a EKM promotion on their website if anyones interested. My EKMpowershop websites looking excellent https://alittlepeaceandkarma.com
One of EKMpowershop’s website owners was on Dragons Den and got an investment with one of the Dragons. Their websites are very professional, search engine friendly and the website in question has millions in sales. You can see his appearance on Dragons Den on his website. I can’t recommend EKMpowershop enough. They’re brilliant. I customised and added most of the elements on my website myself. If you haven’t got your own website and you don’t take the promotion on Paypal, your mad.
This is the Paypal offer for a EKMpowershop. £1 for the first three months and after that the price is £19.99 a month. So if you sell via eBay your already a Paypal customer. EKM have loads of customisable templates that look professional so your website will look professional from the start.
https://www.ekmpowershop.com/paypal-offer.asp
EKM is an excellent system and a good price. It works well and is easy to operate the back end.
Can you check if this will work on Ebay.com as well Chris?
As a side note.
We have recently decided to close our website.
It was custom written to integrate with Ebay, which it did very well.
But the hidden costs were tremendous.
Every time google changed something.
Every time our server people changed something.
Every time Paypal changed something.
We would have to personally finance the recoding.
The expense was never ending.
So we came to the conclusion a couple of weeks ago, that we needed a solution that someone else provided that dealt with all these ongoing costs.
That we could pay them to “manage” the infrastructure of an ever changing website.
This sounds exactly like the solution we needed.
Very interesting.
Mark 🙂
Our last cost that closed it was for a complete re-write.
We had a Zencart 1.38 (something like that), website.
It had been adapted.
Then it started to become a popular “hack” target.
Because of the adaptations for Ebay, it had to be rewritten to take advantage of the 1.39 Zencart update.
Even using a coding team in India, that would have cost £1250.00.
That was just “one” change…
Mark 🙂
The ongoing costs for running your own website (assuming you do it properly) are very high.
Our server alone costs £4500 per year, ongoing in house developement and changes in the region of £20000 per year (salary of FT employee etc).
Plus all the various modules, subscriptions and software add another £5000 per year.
And we’re not big by any means. If you pay £50 a month or whatever, you should expect a service to match.
Servers in the US are a lot cheaper than in the UK, everyone knows this.
Unfortunatley we have to use UK servers for a number of reasons, the main one being SEO.
Our server is a beast:
2x Intel Quad
Xeon 2.13GHz
2x 300GB
SAS RAID1
+1TB SATA
24GB DDR3 Ram etc…
In the US, it would cost in the region of £80 a month, maybe a bit more. But as I say, US servers simply won’t serve our needs.
Due to our software requirements, we have to use fully dedicated servers. Our database is very big, with over 15000 products, most of which have multiple attributes/images, anything less than we have now and our site speed drops and we’d have to reduce our memory allocation to the databse server.
We have to keep each page load to under 2sec’s, not an easy task with facebook modules etc running in the background.
We might be able to make a small saving by downgrading our server, but at the moment it is very fast, something Google likes a lot.
Just spent some time on the phone with one of the channelgrabbers sales advisors. Extremely helpful and the entire idea of auto stock updates when an order is placed or a delivery is received , excites me. Along with order / listing management is perfect for us right now. Plan on signing up with channelgrabber and the ekm integration tonight!
There are various options available for
Multi channel sales with stock synchronisation. Some very expensive, but some cheaper alternatives eg Linworks, £50 which works with a range of different websites.
As stock synchronisation is something I am in the market for, and alternatives seem to be increasing, I wonder if Chris or Sue would like to start a thread on this so we can get some feedback from those using systems already and those who are investigating the market.
I would consider EKM with Channelgrabber which would cost £70/month, but I am sure there should be cheaper alternatives. My £5/month cubecart plus Linworks would be £55, but I have recently come across a company called Selro who are offering Amazon/Ebay stock synching for $12.99 or a magento based website with Amazon/ebay sync for $14.99 (currently in beta mode). If this actually works it sounds cheap as chips compared to the competition. They have a free trial for up to 25 SKU for the Amazon/Ebay management so I will give it a try.
Anyone else know about this company?
I realise this article was specifically about EKM and channelgraber combo, but I think we should compare this offer with the competition whether it be Channel advisor (more expensive) Linworks (more versatile) or Selro (unknown). Daniel from Channelgrabber makes the point that you get what you pay for but as Jimbo points out this is not always the case.
I personally would not say that £840 (channelgrabber) per year or £120 (Selro) per year is comparable enough “to judge the product, not the price tag”, as Daniel states, although that is no doubt down to how vast your individual business turnover is.
I am not trying in any way to criticise Channelgrabber’s offering, it is very welcome.
However I would also say:
It is often the case with fresh products on the market place where there is a pent up demand, that early entrants can and will pile on the MPV (maximum percieved value) while a long term analysis may point to a much lower sustainable price with equal or even better functionality and or back end support.
If all your stock on each individual line is spread over eBay, your website and Amazon and then deducted after each sale, how will this show up in a google shopping data feeds. Will there be a total number of stock showing in your data feed. Google are making a few changes for feeds in May where you will need to add certain fields to you feeds. If your feeds don’t show a number in stock will this effect all shopping comparison feeds. Or will Channel Grabber allocate a certain number to each channel?
Hi All..
I am intrigued with all the comments and not being particularly literate with CSV files and building up files to upload, i wonder if there is anyone out there that (for a very small fee of course)would be able to bulid something that could be used across the platforms mentioned??…I have been involved with 2 businesses that have failed through poor management and through using poor 3rd party companies to “look” after my stocks…Im very interested in the channelgrabber and ekm solution, just wondered if anyone would be honest enough and give their truthful opinions on it?..This is a start up venture on my own as i’m now going to look after it unlike others have tried before me…Thank you
If anyones got an EKMpowershop website, I’ve discovered how to add share this buttons so that they appear on every product pay within your website. I used to paste the HTML code on every product page and everytime I updated and changed the text it disappeared. Now I’ve found out now to add it to every product page so its perminantly on the page. Thats if anyone with an EKM website is interested.