About ChannelAdvisor Labs

On July 1, 2001, we founded ChannelAdvisor by doing a management buyout from Overture Systems (the folks that invented paid-search, previously called GoTo.com and now known as Yahoo! Search Marketing).  ChannelAdvisor is our third company; the previous two were Stingray Software and AuctionRover.com.  Another fact you may not know about us is we both are, well, geeks.  We actually met at North Carolina State University getting our Masters degrees in Computer Engineering.

Now that we’ve been building ChannelAdvisor for five years we realize we are on to something very special.  Our mission of helping the World sell online is certainly an ambitious one, but more importantly we have built a company whose relationships with its customers (both large and small) are less vendor/customer and go much deeper to a partner level.  In fact many of our customers have become close personal friends over the years.

In 2005 when our monthly GMV started to approach $100m/m we realized the time had come to bring in someone with deep experience that could 100% bulletproof our systems so our customer’s data and online businesses would be as reliable, scalable and available (we call it RSA) as possible.  We brought on Ralph Kasuba as our VP of Engineering and he’s doing a stellar job here.

At the same time, we realized we were at a fork in the road from an Engineering standpoint.  In order to bulletproof the existing products would we trade off our ability to innovate quickly?  We decided to start a new team within ChannelAdvisor whose sole purpose is to focus 100% on innovative new ideas.  ChannelAdvisor Labs was born and we’re excited to be able to show you what we’ve been working on.

What we have available at the launch of CA Labs is just the start.  In fact we have enough ideas to keep us busy for another five years.  We’d love to hear your feedback on the CA Labs concept, what you would like to see, what your business priorities are, etc.  Help us help you.

As the creators and leaders of what we call the Channel Management System “space”, we carry the responsibility to continue to innovate and help you grow your businesses with the utmost importance.  With this in mind, it is with pride that we introduce CA Labs to the online selling community.

Sincerely,