Relieving marketplace headaches with dedicated feed support

As an Australian brand and manufacturer, Crazy Skate Co. has primarily relied on a mix of retail, business-to-business, and wholesale relationships to reach customers since its inception in 2004. Due to the popularity of its roller skates, inline skates, and scooters, the company established a United States presence in 2011 to try and expand its customer base.

The growth of online shopping presented Crazy Skate Co. another opportunity to capture more market share, and the brand has been evolving to reach the millions of shoppers on marketplaces such as Amazon, Target Plus, Walmart, and eBay.

One of Adam Miles’ responsibilities as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) is to secure new growth opportunities for Crazy Skate Co., but as the lone person tasked with expanding the company’s ecommerce business, he often found himself spending more and more time on feed management, especially as the company listed products on new marketplaces.

On top of creating and updating the product catalogs for Amazon, Walmart, and eBay, Miles spent hours each week trying to resolve product listing errors and reaching out to seller support on each channel.

“Crazy Skate Co. hired me to build out its online sales, and it turned into an issue where we were limited on how we could grow and expand our market because we were dealing with so many day-to-day headaches,” Miles said.

After weighing his options, Miles decided to enlist Feedonomics’ full-service feed management solution for marketplaces, which includes 24/7 support from a team of feed specialists and channel experts.

With Feedonomics, Miles saves up to 20 hours per week on feed management, giving him the peace of mind and time to focus on reaching new customers as CRO.

“The biggest draw to me personally was the help with the support,” he said. “I knew right away that would be like hiring another staff member.”

No more spinning his wheels

When Miles was looking for a feed management solution, he knew he wanted a company that provided hands-on support with marketplace feed issues. He had spent too much time over the years trying to resolve various Amazon listing errors on his own, which was not only frustrating, but also kept him from his other responsibilities.

Hiring more team members to help resolve the errors and scale the business was an option, but Miles knew that every marketplace had its own listing requirements, best practices, and support needs, which meant bringing in a specialist for each channel. Soon, the company would have “too many cooks in the kitchen.”

“[We’d] been talking about hiring someone to handle the support issues, but the main reason we [didn’t] is because it’s such a specialized thing, dealing with all the different marketplaces,” he said. “It just seemed like such a time-suck, bringing someone up to speed on that.”

Since an in-house feed management team wasn’t practical, Crazy Skate Co. looked for an outside solution provider. Still, it was difficult to identify a partner that could do it all. Some companies offered partial support, but wouldn’t help with Amazon. For Miles, that was a dealbreaker, especially since he wanted to keep everything under one roof.

By comparison, Feedonomics offers 24/7 support with all feed-based issues, plus a dedicated feed manager who becomes familiar with the client’s specific needs. This ultimately got Miles’ attention, and he started using the company in 2020 to manage his marketplace feeds.

Miles noticed an improvement in the level of personal service and support he received compared to other companies he’d tried in the past. He liked the sense of business continuity that came from seeing familiar feed specialists working on his tickets in the Feedonomics support portal.

“[The previous companies] didn’t have the security. It felt like things were going to fall through the cracks,” he said. “It didn’t feel like people were taking ownership or responsibility for the issues, it was just, ‘get in the queue, and hopefully it will get fixed.’”

With Feedonomics, Miles feels confident that his support requests will get handled, and he can rely on his dedicated support team to keep working on any feed-based marketplace issues, like a long-term Amazon bug he had been trying to resolve for months.

“That’s been probably the biggest increase in productivity, just completely removing that,” Miles said. “Where I can just email you guys an issue and move on to something else, where I don’t have to take up my mind-share with the back-and-forth distraction that is Amazon. And I’m so glad I haven’t had to listen to Amazon’s hold music in a year. They play the same music over and over.”

No more “spreadsheets for days”

Prior to Feedonomics, Miles was using Sellbrite as an off-the-shelf solution for syndicating the company’s product feeds. Although he liked the dashboard, Sellbrite didn’t offer a catalog management service. To meet the product listing requirements and follow best practices for each marketplace the company expanded to, Miles had to format the raw product data from Crazy Skate Co.’s Shopify store manually.

“I used to manage the catalog myself on every marketplace, which was very time-intensive,” Miles said. “Spreadsheets for days, for every sales channel. It was a full-time job.”

Feedonomics gave Miles a powerful platform that could create rule-based data transformations, and a team of channel experts to create the rules for him. Now, whenever he adds a new product to Crazy Skates Co.’s catalog, or makes changes to an existing one, the data is automatically formatted and exported to meet the specifications and best practices of each marketplace.

“You have total granular control over what’s going on for each marketplace, but it’s set up in such a way that it is accessible and quick to make changes,” Miles said.

The freedom to focus on growth

At a time when global supply chain issues and fulfillment delays were impacting the customer experience everywhere, it was especially important for Crazy Skate Co. to not make mistakes with its limited inventory.

Miles used Feedonomics’ automated technology for order and inventory management to streamline his workflow and make sure he was monitoring his orders and inventory. He had experienced a few issues in the past with one of Crazy Skate Co.’s third-party logistics partners; on occasion, the warehouse inventory was inaccurate and out-of-stock products could continue selling overnight, requiring some orders to be canceled.

Canceled orders tarnish the customer experience and can hurt a seller’s rating on marketplaces like Amazon if left unchecked. The best way to address problems like these is to prevent them altogether. Thanks to Feedonomics, Miles received alerts for potential inventory problems promptly.

“I get an email from [Feedonomics] telling me that [it] can’t complete this order because we have no inventory, and when that happens, I can jump in and find out which warehouse has the wrong inventory count, what’s gone wrong, and it’s just a nice little heads up,” Miles said. “Sometimes it can take a few hours to a day to be made aware of missing inventory, and [Feedonomics] generally lets me know within an hour.”

Feedonomics’ other safeguards also help Crazy Skate Co. simplify inventory management across multiple marketplaces as the company grows.

The ability to apply export rules in the platform lets Miles designate which products to list on specific marketplaces so that they are reserved for the channels where they perform best. To avoid seller-canceled orders, Miles also applies inventory buffer rules to products that sell quickly, ensuring they are marked out of stock when the inventory goes below a certain threshold. On eBay, he uses inventory rules to only show a dozen units in stock for each SKU and avoid surpassing the channel’s inventory limit, which would result in a listing fee.

Success in ecommerce requires a combination of automated technology and talented people with experience. Feedonomics offers both, giving Miles the freedom to focus on his own areas of expertise.

With the Feedonomics team handling catalog management, marketplace support, and data synchronization, Crazy Skate Co. was able to expand into new marketplaces. Miles supplied the source data to his feed specialists, and they took care of the details, including product categorization, field mapping, parent and variant product relationships, integration setup, and import/export scheduling.

“Basically, [Feedonomics] lets you plug into a full team,” he said. “It’s almost like you’ve really expanded your whole department with a bunch of already trained, already knowledgeable people, and they’re just off-the-shelf ready to go.”