Channel Advisor Channel Advisor over promises and under delivers but expects money when service not delivered as promised Morrisville North Carolina

Let me start by saying that ChannelAdvisor is a giant corporation that is a publicly traded company that offers an incredible platform that allows small companies like myself to easily list products to launch my online business across multiple marketplaces (ebay, amazon, rakuten, sears, etc) which is really what I was sold on and that it can generate more revenue for my business.  Mind you, even before Channel Advisor, I've been in business with Amazon and Ebay for over 5 years now and have a very high feedback score.  

Being able to generate more revenue by jumping onto multiple marketplaces is the main reason why I was prepared to pay the $3500 ebay launch fee and the $750 amazon fee as well as the monthly $2000 fee.  However they never even got us launched.  We started in March 2015 and I decided to terminate service in August 2015 because we never got launched.  We generated $0 from their services as well as lost time and money because we were told that we cannot add more listings until after the launch otherwise it'll just mess things up with the new listings.  We would hope that their services would provide us with at least equal to what our current sales are or more if possible.  However, it was not possible.  Susie told us it wasn't possible and that we should either cancel or switch to another marketplace.  

ChannelAdvisors' launch means they will help us get launched onto ebay and amazon and be able to go live and be able to sell on ebay/amazon through their platform and generate a revenue while they earn $2000/month plus a percentage if we exceed a specific dollar amount.  Mind you, we've generated $0 in revenue up until this point.  6 phases are required to get to launch and become live in the online marketplace.  On the Amazon luanch, we never got past inventory upload.  Here's the big dilemma.  ChannelAdvisor is designed to simplify and streamline the process but it served as a roadblock. We were told that we would have to take down all 30,000 listings we have and start from scratch again which would bring sales down to $0.  Why were we told this? 

Here's why...our sku's are comprised of a CIN number (a CIN is the product number we have assigned to the product and placed into the sku) followed by the employee's initials who added the listing.  Example: 123456 TY, 555555 VA, 987456 PH.   Sometimes for multi-pack listings the sku can look like this....123456x4 AJ to tell us to order 4 for this CIN product number.   As you may already know, on Amazon, as sku CANNOT BE MODIFIED.  If you want to modify the sku, you have to completely delete the sku and re-list the product all over again.  Therefore, a sku CANNOT BE MODIFIED IN ANY WAY.  It has to be deleted.  When we asked the launch team if there's any way around this, they didn't have an answer.   When we asked Matt, the ChannelAdvisor rep, if he had a solution to this or if he can get a solution to this from the launch team, he couldn't even get an answer to this. 

Before we reached out to Matt, the launch team suggested we cancel service or relaunch with another marketplace.  When Matt couldn't suggest a solution, even he suggested we cancel or possibly try a different market place.  However, when we wanted to re-negotiate the contract, they wouldn't let us cancel or even switch to another marketplace even though Matt suggested this to his superiors.  This was the guidance that was provided by their launch team.  The best practice was to delete all of my 30,000 listings that took me the last 4 years to list and they wanted me to take it all down and start all over from scratch. 

They couldn't do anything for us is what they told us and that's what we did.  We listened to them when they told us is was in our best interest to cancel service or change to another marketplace but their superiors denied the request.  We even have multiple amazon listings for one sku but ChannelAdvisor told us this wasn't even possible to do even though those multiple listing are up and generating sales for us everyday.   What are we supposed to do when ChannelAdvisor keeps saying they don't have a solution to our problems?  Be forced to keep paying them $2000 a month for services they can't provide us? 

Money is not the issue.  The issue is the launch team can't provide a solution to our dilemma.  I feel like this is a breach in their contract.  I would gladly pay the $2000 a month if they can get us to launch and be able to generate revenue from their platform.  When they said they couldn't launch amazon, they wouldn't cancel the service, wouldn't refund us for the launch, wouldn't want to change marketplace but wanted to continue to charge us $2000/month.  Please tell me if this is ethical business practice from a publicly traded company.  

We did not ignore anything they asked.  They told us it couldn't work and that we should cancel or switch to another marketplace.  Whatever they asked, we did but when they asked us to take all of our listings down and start from scratch, that didn't make any business sense to the launch team or to us. 

 The only viable payment option offered for us was to continuously pay $2000 per month regardless of whether or not ebay/amazon would be launched or generate any revenue.  Pay $2000 even though they wouldn't be able to successfully launch us.  I find their business practice very unethical.     Matt, the sales representative appeared most ethical and really had our best interest in mind but the executives didn't appear to care.  They just wanted their money regardless of whether their customer was provided a service or not. 

As much as I would like to continue with this company and grow my business, I can no longer work for an unethical corporation who tries to take advantage of small companies like mine.   Unfortunately, when Susie (on an email dated 4/22/15) told us to cancel or switch to another market place, we wanted to.  Even Matt suggested that we cancel.  However, the executives above denied his request and stated that we would have to deal with it.  Even though they say they would like to dedicate their time to making this a success, they don't have a solution to my problem to Amazon's launch. 

Since Matt and Susie said we could cancel, we submitted our request and sought out a different vendor. In less than a month, we were able to launch with the new vendor without any issues.  They were able to work around our issues as well as give us the support we need to launch our business on multiple marketplaces.  I don't understand how a large corporation could spend 6 months working on this project and still can't get us to the launch phase.  It also didn't help when they had their Catalyst Convention which delayed the launch process and Amanda was off certain days and no one could take over for her while she was away.  We really made every effort to make this work but they just couldn't come up with a solution.  I genuinely wanted to make this work as Matt gave me hope by intervening so I gave it another chance to make it work but since he couldn't even get an answer for me, he regretfully told me to submit for a cancellation and that's what I did.  

At this time, they are sending me to collections and want me to pay $24,000 ($2,000x12 months term of contract).  They want me to pay for services they never fully executed on.  That's funny how they want us to continue paying on a service they're not providing.  To me, that's a breach of their contract and is unethical practice.  They refused to renogotiate the contract.  They wouldn't allow me to change to another marketplace nor would they allow me to just work on ebay as a test before we launch amazon since my ebay was smaller