http://www.internetretailer.com/dailyNews.asp?id=24051

I’ll have more on this later.

We’re also working diligently on a new release which will add more elements to the ChanneBrain UI and also give people more reporting capabilities, I can’t say when that will be released, but from what I’m seeing, there’s going to be some amazing new features and functions which are not only exciting but very, very useful. Customers who sign up or have signed already, will recognize those features. I’ll have more on that as soon as we get closer to the release of the next version.

Its clear to us after dealing with Shopping.com, there’s some oddities in the way they are doing business with retailers. Following their rules to a “T” doesn’t always get your products into their engine properly — we’re starting to wonder if there’s something they’re doing to the products to improve their AdWords exposure so that they can push the products through to AdWords, and to get their AdSense dollars. It appears that they are doing “something” to make things harder for merchants, but that “something” is still not clear as to why.

Case and point.

We’ve had some problems with our customers reporting that the categories they are sending their products too are not working right. When we looked into the issue, the customer’s products were clearly mapped from ChannelBrain to the right category, but they would end up in categories on Shopping.com’s side which were not ones that the customer chose. For example, a customer would map all their products to the Auto category, only to find them show up in the Home & Garden category — being engineers, we figured “bug”, checked the feed output and sure enough each product’s taxonomy was correct, “Auto” was the only category listed. So we filed a ticket with Shopping.com who replied (only 3 days later…).

We got this ominous response from Shopping.com:

“We have a weighted algorithm that makes the decision based on several factors as to where your product is categorized to, category information provided by the merchant being one of the last factors looked at. What is important are MPN, UPC, product descriptions , product names (picking up keywords related to categories) and manufacturer information. ”

This was interesting to us, as we make sure products ChannelBrain categorizes is based on the taxonomy of the provider, in this case, Shopping.com has a discreet set of category guidelines which ChannelBrain’s engine follows closely.

This response is disturbing because MPN (Manufacturers Part Number) has NOTHING to do with a category, and not every product being put into an engine is going to have UPC code. Ok, Product descriptions are fairly straight forward, but from our standpoint, Shopping.com is doing some odd things in their “algorithm” to get products into the right place under a taxonomy that they require you follow.

They state further:

“We cannot leave mapping strictly to the merchants as some will want their products to go in one category and others may want the same product to be listed in another category. We are in the process of trying to remap the products right now but without these key pieces of information these issues will continue to happen.”

Ok, so what they are saying is that all that taxonomy they make you go through is basically fruitless, that your basically at bay to their “algorithm”. This is not good. It means you MIGHT get products into a place where they shouldn’t be, and you might be paying for those clicks that you don’t want. This customer for example had an MPN which was the same as another product in the category they mapped it into. The only problem, the products weren’t even close. One was a portable telephone by Panasonic, and the customers part was an air filter for a diesel engine. They just HAPPEN to share a model number that was close. The fix to that was to have the customer put a label in the MPN to distinguish this by adding the manufacturers actual name in the MPN so it looked like this “COMPANY ABC-123″ instead of “ABC-123″. This seemed to fix the problem of duplicates, but it still didn’t solve the problem as to how it got into that category.

Then came the body blow…

“One band-aid fix is to turn off the category you don’t want by putting your bid to zero for whatever categories you would not like to be charged for.”

Well, there ya go. Categories really mean nothing and if thats the case, how can a merchant control their ROI in Shopping.com if they are going to charge you for categories your products don’t belong in.

We are investigating this further and I’ll update as things we find out more. But for now, we’re recommending customers be real conscience of Shopping.com’s categories by going into the merchant panel and investigating where your products are being sent. If you have questions as to what ChannelBrain is sending, you can always generate a manual feed and check, if it proves that your taxonomy is correct, you should send that information to Shopping.com and show them what you’ve found — otherwise, you’ll be paying for clicks that you don’t want.

It appears Shopping.com’s odd ways are costing merchants a lot of money. We hope to have more on this later.

First off, thanks to all those who stopped by and watched our demonstrations. We appreciate the interest in ChannelBrain and our other products, and we enjoy meeting customers and folks who were interested in seeing ChannelBrain and what it could do for them. The one thing that really hit home with us was the overwhelming sense of “ah ha!!” when we showed this to folks. More people smiled and looked at us and said, “I like that”. That makes you feel good as a solutions provider because its showing that you’re doing exactly what the customers are asking you to do; create a solution for them that solves a problem, not just a software product.

Here’s a couple quotes from people…

“wow, no more hours spent on creating files and figuring out what went wrong!”

“Where do I sign up? I have an employee dedicated to this exact process, now they can do what they were hired to do…”

And my personal favorite:

“This product is better than duct tape!”

Paul and I were little confused when she said that, but then she explained:

“Duct tape is the cure all fix for all that is broken. In your ad’s, have pipes to show you how complicated it is, get it?”

Sometimes we are even too cute for own liking. The customer completely understood the purpose of this product and (amazingly) got the marketing message!

Some bullet points that I captured which we wanted to share…

Bigger Inventory Sets Please

One thing that came out of the show was the notion that our packages might be too “small” for some customers. So immediately, we upgraded the Professional package to 10,000 from 5,000 products. There were more people coming to the booth saying “well, I have 8,000 products I want to sell, how is this going to work?”. We decided to up the limit to 10,000 with the possibility of going higher. If people feel that 10,000 is even too small, email me and we’ll discuss that.

More Providers Coming, We Promise

We hit the market with six providers. Shoppzilla, Froogle, Shopping.com, Become.com, NextTage and BuyersEdge. All of which are fairly well known and popular. We have a list of others that we feel were “second tier” and could wait a couple weeks. Without saying too much, I’m excited about the ability to provide an abundance of marketing channels to our customers and giving them the best possible syndication path for their products. Keep watching the site, we’ll have something shortly to announce.

If Its Good, Competitors with Appear

If its a good idea, you’re probably going to have competition…

At the show we had a situation where I was talking and someone quickly walked by and grabbed a brochure (incidentally, its a PDF on our site you can download) and ran. Paul pointed out that he saw the persons badge and that it was a competitor. Not that this action bothered me (they should have just stopped an said ‘hello!’), but it showed me how this space quickly became viable and very competitive overnight.

We started initial development on ChannelBrain back in September of 2006, we released on May 1, 2007.

A torrid development pace but we knew that the competition would start nipping at our heals, so we made sure we worked hard to get 1.0 out there for our customers. By the time we hit the streets with the press announcement, there were competitors creeping up or who had already released.

When we did our market analysis, there was one MAYBE two, but they were a geared towards only serving the fortune 1000 companies at a price that didn’t make sense for our target customer base. By the time the product hit the streets, there were a couple who had popped up in “beta” that had feature sets and prices that came close to ChannelBrain but still lacked some of our features (i.e. Analytics and Reporing comes to mind).

One can take this as a bad sign, I tend to think its validating what we’ve done in a positive way.

In fact, looking at the competitors. I see that there really is different types of companies and products doing similar things in a space thats wide open with plenty of room.

[note: ChannelAdvisor just got a round for 30M for a service which is much more expensive that does the same thing as ChannelBrain. They basically got saddled up with an eBay Ventures, but my point is, this is big. And the competitors will continue to come.]

Anyway, I tend to think we’re the best at this, but thats a biased statement of course. But I do believe that, and I have a good reason too. Looking at our history as a company and our products. We have an existing customer base of e-commerce companies on our BizSync platform who are long time veterans in the catalog and direct industry, and these folks were great to tap into when we built ChannelBrain.

Our market and our customers dictated ChannelBrain’s feature set and how it was designed.

In my opinion, without that kind of help, It would be hard to just start from scratch without having a sense of what the customer needs AND hit a home run. In fact, I think the biggest problem I see if I was a competitor against us, is that we have a built in customer base that wanted this product. If you’re competing against ChannelBrain, you’re basically going to have to have some pretty good catalog and direct centric features to be able to get a leg up. Right now, I haven’t seen that.

With that said, I think the competitors are climbing an up hill battle by building a product that tries to solve a business problem but without the benefit of having a customer base to tap into to build it with.

Sure, you might come up with a decent ‘tool’, but its not a “solution”, its just a tool. How many times have you found a “tool” only to find that it does 60% of the job and fails to perform the final 40%. If you know anything about software development, you can attribute that to ‘a bunch of developers who are decent, but have no understanding of customer requirements’.

ChannelBrain was built because our customers said “we need this”. And we did it, not because it was sexy or fun (even though it was!), but the problem of syndicating your catalog, measuring and growing your revenue in the marketing channels is a huge and complex problem we wanted to solve for our customers and we have.

ChannelBrain solves this by giving our customers a solution that is built with the brains to talk their language and know their game.

So far, its worked because we’re seeing folks heading to ChannelBrain coming from the competition and telling us that “they didn’t get it, its not quite working”, or telling us they had problems even getting service. Something that we hear a lot of in the space we’re in no matter what the product is. We have a moto at Freeportway, “Service Means Business”. And it appears this moto has done us well over the 7+ years we’ve been around. So why get away from that?

Lastly I’ll say this: People selling on the Web need a solution that solves a problem for them, not just a tool to assemble data and re-format it, they need a solution that can give some intelligence and understanding as well as make it easy for them to market their catalog in the on-line marketing channels and comparison shopping engines (CSE’s). What we’re hearing is that ChannelBrain is much more than that and then some.

Gary

Yeah, its a neat name. We like it…

Simply put, ChannelBrain (CB) is Web based platform that will help you syndicate your inventory to places that will promote your
products to increase your sales and profits, easily, efficiently and affordably.

These places are known as �??merchandising�?? or marketing channels, and the Internet is littered with places that want to push your
products to eyeballs that you can’t reach just from your site. These �??channels�?? are in the business of capturing shoppers and targeting
them specifically to products the shopper is looking for. With more targeted shoppers coming to your site, the potential for conversions
increase and when conversions increase, so does your profits.

What are Channels?

Channels can be anything from a paid comparison shopping engine like Shopping.com, to data-feed marketing sites like Froogle.

Moreover, they can extend to places like eBay, Amazon Shops and even offline advertisement / marketing
venues. In reality, channels are any place that are �??potential�?? revenue opportunities, and yes, that includes search engines. With these
channels comes the benefit of including your products into search engines and gaining rankings where you might not be doing well.
In fact, Channel Merchandising is the next logical step a merchant needs to take to increase their revenue online. To reach all your
potential shoppers, search engine marketing alone is not going to achieve that, you need other channels to accomplish this.
You need targeted traffic, and you need traffic that is visiting your site with the mindset that they want to purchase. Channel
marketing does that and more.

And ChannelBrain is?

ChannelBrain is a single integration point from existing retail systems to online marketing channels.

That means your current retail system and e-commerce system, whatever it might be, will work with ChannelBrain and
you can create a single data feed to expand to many channels. Or as we like to say, �??One format fits all.�??

By simply exporting your products and formatting them into ChannelBrain’s optimized format, you can syndicate to any
channel that ChannelBrain supports. Its quite easy actually, and because our product is Web based, there’s no installation
of software or third-party tools.

Once your products are in ChannelBrain, you can create �??campaigns�?? to market through channels, submit your products to the
channel providers you decide to include in your campaign, and then you

If that wasn’t powerful enough, the real �??mojo�?? with ChannelBrain is in its ability for you, the merchant, to measure and optimize
your syndication to these channels. With ChannelBrain’s powerful reporting and measurement tools, you’ll be able to see, real-time,
where you’re succeeding and more importantly, where you need to make adjustments.

This is ChannelBrain’s real power; the ability to give you the information to know what channel marketing
campaigns work and what are not.

This blog will be the �??contact point�?? for people interested in ChannelBrain, its development and any news pertaining to the market
in which ChannelBrain is lives in.

We hope that you will subscribe to this blog and become a regular reader as we plan on posting as much here as
humanly possible about ChannelBrain, channel merchandising and anything related to channel marketing.

Also visit our forums section which customers regularly visit and post messages.
This is a moderated forum and will be the best place to ask questions about ChannelBrain, how it works, and
what it can do for your business.

Finally, visit our booth at the ACCM in Boston, May 21 - 23. We’ll be discussing ChannelBrain and our other
products from Freeportway.

Gary