Channable: Product Data Feeds

Underrated, but truly the best app for feed management, especially for EU shopify stores. Besides sending your feeds to all possible channels, you can also receive back orders from marketplaces like Amazon and Ebay, which then get imported into Shopify.

The problem was that we had to build our own API integration with shopify to import the orders back. So in other words they can send feeds FROM shopify TO each channel you want, but getting orders back from lets say Amazon is not natively possible. You have to build your own API for that. Access to this API costs €50 a month, which is high in my opinion. If they in the future decide to build their own shopify order integration, then the price would also be €50 a month, but in the mean time I had to make a lot of developer costs to integrate the API. In that regard I'm not surprised that they don't have a lot of reviews here and would have preferred to give this review here if they had built their own Shopify order import first.

Great app and customer service. It's a self-service app and you need to do some manual work for the integrations, but once you get everything set up it's easy to control. Good value for the price of subscription, definitely recommended!

So far it has been very easy to use Channable as a feed manager, as soon as we have any inquiry or issue, we send an email to the support and we get a direct reply. One thing that is good is that when we get support from someone of Channable, all the communications until the problem is solved are kept with the same person (something that saves a lot of time updating the case status). The support bot though normally goes bad and only gives some tutorial links, but you need to understand that it is a "bot" and not a real interaction on the other side of the chat. The only thing I found a bit tricky is the price & plans, it would be nice to have something more customized to the client's needs, according to the dimension of the catalog and marketplaces. Thanks and regards!

***UPDATE*** Channable's Tech Support reacted within hours and clarified in a DM, that the Hourly Update module is part of the Order Sync add-on module. That level of clarification I have not been able to distill from their page unfortunately and wasn't able to discover in the test account. In consequence I've updated the rating and added another star. ********************************************************************************** Having compared all relevant feed management tools in test account mode my feedback to Channable was first off ambivalent, however improved after their Tech Support clarified on important aspects. Channable offers a broad range of connections and the interface is quite intuitive, though a bit heavy. But everyone looking for this topic should be able to manage the level of complexity. Tested it and it took me less than 30 minutes to get a basic feed of ca. 300 product up and running. I have not activated any channel (test mode ends at that point), but if it is as easy as the above, time to market should be short. Please bear in mind you have to setup accounts and commercial agreements with any marketplace and price comparison sites you want to connect. That brings me to the pricing model, that offers different modules for different company sizes. I am looking at it with the eyes of a small shop that wants to scale distribution via marketplaces and comparison sites so for us "Small Business" and "Medium Business" would be relevant. In the smallest package with your website (1 language) and 500 products you're getting 3 connections to above mentioned third parties for 29€/M so ca. 350€/Y. The next (likely better) tier for small shops in growth hacking mode would be the Medium for 49€/M (588€/Y) allowing you to add 2 projects (so 1 shop in 2 languages or 2 shops in 1 language) with 6 channels. Fixed and transactional costs of third party channels e.g. Amazon would come on top depending on channel you want to connect. The packages include a one way product feed to the channels meaning your product information incl. price and stock levels are being sent to channels, however once an order is made this is not being fed back via an API to your system so orders won't bei integrated automatically, hence stock levels won't change. That is an Add-on called Order-Sync 49€/M (588€/Y), which you probably would want, as otherwise you would have to handle incoming orders from 3-6 channels (beyond 2 it's already a pain in peak season). So fair enough you've learned that you will probably pay something like 78-98 €/M or 936-1176 €/Y (not including fixed fees of third parties) to be in the channel management game, which is pretty much in the range of what you pay everywhere. What they don't tell you clearly enough on their page is, that will get an "Hourly update" of the feed included at that price level. An Addon that you normally have to pay for as the "free" alternative is only daily, which obviously is not an option at all. Imagine your stock levels being pushed to 6 channels/marketplaces are only updated once a day. So book your "Order Sync" module and you're fine! To sum up good tool with great functionalities and good value for money. For very small businesses I would rank Channable still a 3 out of 5 as I think the blank "Starter Package" is not alleviating the pains Small Business owners a going through.