Age-old Problem for Multi-channel Sellers, so it seems!

Gee man, it's hard to get a break sometimes!!!

I am having fun learning about multichannel selling. In an ideal world I can have a huge superstore with millions of products, selling across Bonanza, eBid, iOffer, Addoway, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, Facebook and more. Each day I could edit one store and all the others would update automatically. All stores would be dynamic and continually strive to offer sellers more flexibility, advanced features and better options.

The reality is something else. Feebay now insist on having ridiculous seller limitations, meaning I need to live to the age of 8,789 to get a store open with more than 200 listings. That pretty well eliminates a selling marketplace that as of yesterday was ranked 20 on Alexa's Page Rank. Nice. As I explained to the people at eBid, if only they would combine with Bonanza, Addoway and iOffer to make ALL their categories uniform then listings could be better managed and interchanged between those sites.

So now we have a bevy of multichannel selling service providers such as Highwire, ChannelAdvisor, Volution, Vendio, Magento, Linnworks, eSeller Pro, Seller Express and many more to do just that. Except that they all do something slightly different and when you trial their services you realize they all have shortcomings and niggly aspects that disappoint you. Recently I toyed with Highwire and I really liked it. Except the part where I realized I can't import all my listings because of seller limitations on eBay. But it is still great if you want to sell on Facebook....I think.

There is I am sure a consensus that product data feeds a nuisance to deal with and primarily because the major players do not want to play ball and make feed layout and selling categorization uniform. That would mean you can import and export data feeds with no mess and no fuss - a dream really. My most recent project involved using a guy I sourced from elance.com to reconfigure CSV data files from Bonanza and make them importable into eBid. This has been achieved, to some extent at least. Once again what is causing a headache is the selling categories - something like a thousand of them on eBid.

How many buyers genuinely use categories to drill down to find products these days??? When I want something I type it into Bonanza, Google or eBay or Amazon (or all of them) and analyze my options from there. I don't want to sit around like a clown clicking category after category only to get "0 results" from a search. It seems like the major marketplaces don't want to encourage us to sell anywhere else than their site! Anti-competition I say and about time regulators looked at it.

What is really required is one system that can take a CSV file and produce output feeds for the tope ten or twenty marketplaces. And it doesn't appear there are any who can do this for an affordable price. Not that it is impossible, but certainly it is well out the the reach of the average small business trying to get a foothold in the retail market.

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