Channel Intelligence announced a strategic alliance with Infopia.

From the press release:

“This relationship provides access for CI customers to Infopia’s eCommerce platform—to help them become high volume sellers on eBay, which is a $34B marketplace in the United States alone.”

CI and eBay? Isn’t that supposed to be ChannelAdvisor (CA) and eBay?

Well, that could be the point. CI already works with eBay and other marketplaces such as Amazon and Shop.com through SellCast, but no one knows CI as an eBay helper company. At the same time, CI could be targeting the smaller merchant through this deal, expanding beyond the brand names they currently work with.

With ChannelAdvisor’s recent acquisition of MarketWorks, CA has a stranglehold on the top eBay sellers. Now the real value of those eBay sellers in the long run is still questionable. I’m sure that CA and CI both hope that they can upsell eBay sellers on basic commerce operations as well as off-eBay marketing activites (PPC, SEO, Affiliate Programs, other Marketplaces, etc.). But that’s tough to do when you’re dealing with fairly unsophisticated merchants who only know of life on eBay.

The other side of the equation, though, says that eBay sellers are fed up with eBay and need a way to expand. Note PriceGrabber’s more aggressive push towards acquiring individual sellers. Not targeting the millions of eBay sellers would be naive.