Channel Intelligence announced this morning that Ron Sparks has been named VP of SellCast Development.

No, I don’t usually discuss these type of press releases, but Ron and I worked together ages ago at VarsityBooks.com. Back in early 2006, I even talked to him briefly about working for SingleFeed. And then I told him great things about Channel Intelligence. My mistake!

He started at CI in June of 2006 and seems to have been kicking ass ever since. Ron is a smart, nice, dedicated guy and CI is lucky to have him.

Congrats, Ron!

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.

As I mentioned in my Google Base Optimization post, I only think a couple companies are seriously talking about data feed optimization (DFO) and really understand the importance of product attributes. One of those companies is Channel Intelligence (the other companies being Channel Advisor and SingleFeed - yes, I’m biased).

Well, if you’re in Orlando Florida on April 26th & 27th, you might want to check out Channel Intelligence’s Product Attribute Summit. I love it. A conference just about the importance of Product Attibutes for data feeds!

One note of caution. Make sure to get detailed information about the speakers and sessions before you register (there are no speakers listed yet). Unfortunately, the last time I saw CI run a session at a conference was at eTail when they basically did a paid advertisement for their product as opposed to providing actionable information for the attendees.

http://channelintelligence.vnewscenter.com/press.jsp?id=1174360655149

Congrats to Rob and his team for closing it’s Series F round. The funding came from ICG (or as they were known back in the hey-day of the internet bubble, I See the next GE). $15m bought ICG 40% of the company on a ‘primary’ basis. Not sure what ‘primary’ means at this point, but assuming it’s just silly banker lingo, the round would value Channel Intelligence (CI) at $37.5m. According to the Business Week article, Channel Intelligence is expecting revenue of $10m in 2006.

At first glance, this looks like a low valuation for CI. Back in August, CEO Rob Wight was quoted as saying 2006 revenue would be $12-20m and the company was growing at 50% per year. Obviously, just looking at a revenue multiple doesn’t give the entire story. I’m not going to find out what’s happening under the hood, but I’m following up with Rob tomorrow.

BTW, Vcommerce is one of ICG’s portfolio companies, so don’t be surprised to see a deal between Vcommerce and CI sometime next year.

Related:
Channel Intelligence Press Release - November 28, 2006
Internet Capital Press Release - November 28, 2006

There are a number of companies which provide services to retailers listing products on the shopping comparison engines. Channel Intelligence does this and a lot more. Here’s a write up of my call with Rob Wight of Channel Intelligence…

Briefly, what is Channel Intelligence?
“We provide commerce data services to manufacturers, dealers, and affiliates to make it easy for them to get a user from looking at a product to buying a product. We are a data based company that provides information to make the process of ecommerce easy and successful for dealers, manufacturers, and affiliates.”

You provide a lot of different services to clients, but how do you work with manufacturers, dealers, and affiliates on the shopping comparison engine front?
“We have varying relationships with all our partners. We have paying clients in all three categories, but not all relationships are paying.”

We work with hundreds of Manufacturers (defined as the original creator of product)…
“We help manufacturers list the dealers (online and brick and mortar) that have their product in stock and are able to sell it right now. We link manufacturer product pages to the product pages of the online resellers based on who the manufacturer chooses. For brick and mortar dealers, we list dealers that have product in stock right now so the consumer can go directly to the stores to buy it. We receive a daily feed of inventory information (both for online products and local inventory for the dealers).”

We work with thousands of Dealers (defined as reseller of a product)…
“We provide dealers with services to syndicate their commerce content out to shopping engines and other affiliates so their products are effectively listed on affiliate sites. This involves either getting the products into unified listings or in the non-unified product pages.”

We work with dozens and dozens of Affiliates (defined as intermediaries - any one of a variety of different sites that aren’t dealers or manufacturers)…
“Affiliates can be shopping engines, but also other types of aggregators such as large portals, specialty content sites, Amazon, eBay, search engines, etc. We customize the outbound syndication feed for effectiveness within the particular affiliate. What we send to a search engine is different than what we send to a unified page on a shopping comparison engine.”

“We also provide affiliates with back end data services to help them unify products, help them categorize and have as effective a commerce site as possible. With some affiliates, we provide them with feeds detailing local availability of products, with others, we provide categorization of products.”

“We’re a massive data aggregator. Circuit City will tell us to syndicate out their data. HP will tell us to create links out to dealers. An affiliate will ask us to provide local shopping information.” Read the rest of this entry »