Announcing ChannelUnity

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Since their launch in November 2009 our Channel Integration solutions for Magento have proven a massive success. They have helped us to grow from a sole developer to a limited company with 2 full time staff. Today, more than 300 stores worldwide use our Amazon integration for Magento and many retailers both amongst this number and in countries yet to be served by our solutions await release of our Worldwide eBay solution. There is significant and real demand for what we do. In September 2010 we conducted a survey which found that more than 90% of our customers would consider using an integration for another marketplace developed by Camiloo.

We have always felt that at the heart of a merchant services business should come customer support. Our solutions are designed to meet the needs of retailers and make life easier; when things don’t quite work as they should, we have always felt it important to be there for you – whether you are on a free trial of our software or a paid customer. Today we are announcing a move which will ensure that we can continue this tradition of outstanding ‘above the call of duty’ support. ChannelUnity.

ChannelUnity will be a cloud-based web service capable of scaling with demand, and paid for on a monthly subscription per marketplace you wish to use the service for. The service will take a single feed of data – our own Cxml data schema – and will translate your product information, stock, price, image and variation data with ease into the required XML formats which Amazon and eBay (initially) each require. The beauty of the system lies in its simplicity – you will simply need to instruct the connector module to add your products to your marketplace account, and it will do the legwork for you. And as more marketplaces are enabled you will be able to easily and quickly add them to your account.

We understand the importance of providing outstanding customer support, and for that reason ChannelUnity customers will have 2 support incidents per month included in their subscription. This support credit may be redeemed against adding products onto a marketplace for you, consultancy on cross-channel strategy or simply matching up product data with required channel data fields. From our channel integration experience thus far we understand that telephone support is important to some customers, and we want to ensure we meet this need. Therefore your support time will also cover the cost of providing telephone based support as and when you need it. Should you require more than 2 support incidents, additional support time will be available be purchased.

We feel this move will make our solutions both more sustainable and reliable, as we are now approaching a point where support response times are falling below our stated 2 day target. This is simple economics at work; as a small but growing company we have to undertake client based projects alongside our channel integration work, and when we do it becomes harder to meet the demands of our customers. Moving to a cloud based subscription service with rapidly available support when our customers need it will cure this issue.

However, we aren’t forgetting the investment that our existing customers made when choosing our solutions. When ChannelUnity launches in May this year, our existing customers will be able to choose to keep their existing license for the current versions of our channel integrations, or upgrade to ChannelUnity for a lifetime discounted monthly subscription. We will then be ending the product lifecycle for our existing integrations, with these being released as ‘developer editions’ for those who feel able to use software without support.

ChannelUnity will launch in late May this year. Pricing and marketplace details will be announced nearer the time. In the meantime we remain fully committed to providing as much support as possible to both new and existing customers of our integrations.

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