ChannelGrabber Newsletter: May/June 2019

Find out about our latest development projects during May and June, future plans and insights into the e-commerce industry

Chelsea Kelly avatar
Written by Chelsea Kelly
Updated over a week ago

Published:  28th June 2019

Hello all and welcome to the May/June edition of the ChannelGrabber Newsletter!

The last couple of months have been as busy as ever here at ChannelGrabber HQ, with loads of server infrastructure and system improvements "under the hood", as well as some great new features in the user interface too!

Read on to find out what we've been hard at work on...
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Find out about the improvements and brand new features we have been working on for you, and about our future plans for development.

 

  

Listing Improvements:  Amazon Bullet Points and Search Terms

We have now added support for adding bullet points and key search terms to Amazon listings - Hurrah!  That means you can create even more eye-catching and better-performing listings for Amazon from within ChannelGrabber's super-simple listing interface!

 

New Order Filter:  "Dispatchable by Merchant"

We have introduced a new filter to the Orders page which allows you to filter orders based on whether you have enough stock of the items assigned to the orders to be able to fulfil/dispatch the orders or not.  

  • Yes = all orders where the items are in stock and the order status is Awaiting Payment or New

  • No = orders where the status is Awaiting Payment or New but there is not enough stock available to complete the full order

You will find this in the "More" section of the Orders filter bar.

Shipping:  Bulk Apply Courier and Service

To make creating your courier labels more efficient in ChannelGrabber, we have now added an option in the Ship interface to Bulk Apply / overwrite the courier and service for all selected orders as once.  

This means that, even if you have Shipping Aliases setup, if you want to filter your orders by weight for example, and some of the automatically mapped services are not appropriate for the weight of the item ordered, it's now much simpler and quicker to overwrite the mapped service with the actual service you want to ship with for multiple orders at once:

Efficiency Improvements to Royal Mail (OBA) Integration

Earlier this quarter we broke company records by releasing a brand new courier integration in the shortest time ever!  Inevitably, once our customers started using the new integration there was feedback on ways we could make it better, so we have taken that on board and made several changes to the OBA setup and shipping process to make it all more efficient:

  • Expand the "Service" selection field in the Shipping Aliases, to make it easier to see more of the service name and code

  • Add a Search bar to the service selection field in the Shipping Aliases to make it easier to search for a specific service name or code without having to scroll down the entire list

  • Arrange shipping service names alphabetically in the Shipping Aliases to make it easier to scan through the list of results

  • 20 character limit on the City field has been increased to 30 characters - this was not a limit imposed by ChannelGrabber, but we approached our Royal Mail partner to report that this was causing problems for our customers and they have now increased the limit as above - yay!

  • Dimensions are no longer compulsory so as long as a weight is present, a Royal Mail label can now be created even if there are no dimensions set.

 
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Option to Display or Remove Linked Products on Invoices

The current behaviour is that, if a Linked Product (eg. Bundle) is ordered, then the invoice generated by ChannelGrabber shows the actual SKU ordered first on the invoice table, followed by a list of all linked/component products.  Most of our customers who use Bundles find this helpful as it makes sure that no items are missed when picking from the invoice.  However, some customers, particularly those who use Linked Products for SKU Mapping rather than Bundles, have requested that we make this an optional field, so it can be turned off and only have the main SKU/Bundle item shown on the invoice and NOT the component/linked products.  We will make this optional for all users so you can choose how you want the invoice to break down the products/bundles when ordered.
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PDF Template Designer / Packing Slips  

We are going to make improvements to the current Invoice Designer tool, to make it more flexible, and to allow multiple formats of PDF to be designed in ChannelGrabber.  Then on the Orders page, you can choose whether to print a standard invoice for the orders, or you can choose from any other PDF format that you have designed.  

This will allow you to design things like packing slips, to incorporate key order details without the need to print a full invoice page for every order, or customised shipping labels for if you want to print address labels in your own format rather than using a connected courier's labels for example.  The possibilities will be limited only by your imagination!  :)
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eBay Listing Templates

With so many customers now benefiting from ChannelGrabber's listing tool, we recognise that one of the most highly requested additions to this is the option to add a HTML description template to the listing for eBay.  This will allow you to save a HTML template in ChannelGrabber that can then be applied to the listing when it is submitted to eBay by ChannelGrabber.

 

 

If you have an idea for an improvement or new feature you would like to see us add to the system in the future, please do let us know, by emailing featurerequests@channelgrabber.com
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If you're asking for something that has already been requested, we will add your vote to the feature to give it higher priority, or if your idea is totally fresh, we will add a new request to our developers' board for votes and future consideration.

We almost always prioritise feature requests based on demand, so the more users that vote for a feature, the higher up the "to-do" list it will move  ;)

Don't forget, you can also check out our public development roadmap as well, which will give you an idea of what we're working on and what's next in line/further down our developers' queue at any time:  ChannelGrabber Transparent Product Roadmap

Can't wait to hear your thoughts!

 

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Here, we'll pass on any newsworthy events or changes that we've learned about the e-commerce industry that may affect our system or you, our customers.      
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Royal Mail remove access to their services from NetDespatch

It was announced a couple of months ago that Royal Mail wrote to NetDespatch users stating that their access to Royal Mail services via NetDespatch would cease from the 31st of May 2019.  ChannelGrabber customers were of course amongst those affected, although thankfully we already had our new Royal Mail integration in place well before this deadline, but nonetheless, this cause a lot of concern for our customers, all of whom were trying to switch over to the new integration before the deadline.  

At the last minute, this deadline was extended to 29th June due to the fact that so many online retailers had been unable to find suitable alternatives to NetDespatch in the original (very short) time frame, but as far as we know at this time, there will be no further extensions after this.  If you have not already, we highly recommend that you check out our guide on connecting ChannelGrabber to your Royal Mail OBA account!
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eBay Spring 2019 Seller Release

If you haven't already checked in out, eBay published their Business Seller News back in late April, with several new tools and important changes to how you can sell on eBay included in this update:


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6 Ways to Make Money from Amazon: 

Build Your Business with Amazon

Thinking of selling on Amazon but not sure where to start?  Feeling like you've hit a plateau and want to shake things up and increase your sales on Amazon? Or want to build a different kind of business such as self-publishing an eBook?  

Amazon have introduced their "Build Your Business With Amazon" platform, which acts as a directory to help people find the right resources to build a business around Amazon's many services.

  1. Create and sell

  2. Spread the word

  3. Deliver Amazon packages

  4. Build in The Cloud

  5. Publish your work

  6. Stream your games live

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We hope you have enjoyed the May/June edition of our newsletter and found some useful information to help you with your online business.  

Why not also check out the blog page on our website, to keep up to date with news from us as well as even more industry insights and input from guest authors too?
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As always, if you would like to discuss anything relating to your ChannelGrabber account, please feel free to contact our team using the Intercom chat system (the chat icon can be found on the lower right corner of any ChannelGrabber page) or by emailing help@channelgrabber.com
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Happy Channel-Grabbing!  :)

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