ChannelAdvisor pricing — the name changed, the fee architecture is on public record

The name first, because it changes what you should be searching for

ChannelAdvisor was founded in 2001 in Morrisville, North Carolina and traded publicly for years. In November 2022 it was acquired by CommerceHub in a take-private transaction, and in December 2023 the combined business rebranded as Rithum, unifying both product lines under one identity. Insight Partners had acquired a majority stake in CommerceHub in December 2020. The ChannelAdvisor name persists in one visible place: the Rithum site still carries a ChannelAdvisor login link for existing customers.

This matters for a pricing search in a practical way. Quotes, contracts and comparisons written before the rebrand describe a company that no longer exists under that name, and the current commercial terms are Rithum's. If you are renewing an old ChannelAdvisor agreement, you are renewing with Rithum, and the renewal is the moment to reopen terms rather than roll them.

Since the surrounding pages on this site use one acronym constantly: DSP means demand-side platform — software for buying programmatic display, video and audio. Amazon separately runs a Delivery Service Partner programme for parcel-delivery franchises, which is unrelated. We are Dr. DSP, an Amazon demand-side platform product from Full Circle, a full-service Amazon management company with more than $500M in managed revenue across 100+ brands.

No rate card today, but the model is on public record

Rithum publishes no pricing. The site has no rate card and routes to a demo request, which is standard for commerce software sold at this level. But because ChannelAdvisor spent years as a public company, its filings describe the pricing architecture with a precision no vendor website ever offers.

The model, as set out in those filings: customers typically pay a recurring subscription fee based on a specified minimum amount of gross merchandise value or advertising spend that the customer expects to process through the platform. The remaining portion of the fee is variable and is based on a specified percentage of GMV or ad spend processed in excess of that specified minimum. The fixed portion and any implementation fees are recognised over the contract term; the variable portion is recognised in the period the related GMV is processed.

Two caveats stated plainly. That description comes from historical filings of a company that has since been taken private and rebranded, so treat it as the durable shape rather than as today's quote. And architecture is exactly what tends to survive a rebrand — rate cards change annually, but the logic of "a floor plus a percentage above it" rarely does. Ask Rithum directly whether that structure still applies to your agreement. It is a specific, answerable question, which is the kind worth asking.

A fee on GMV is a fee on your whole business

This is the point most comparisons miss, and it is the one that costs real money. A percentage charged on gross merchandise value behaves completely differently from a percentage charged on advertising spend, even when the two percentages look similar on paper.

• GMV grows for reasons that have nothing to do with the vendor. A retail partnership, a seasonal spike, a price increase, a viral moment — all of them raise your bill without anyone touching the platform.
• The bill rises when margin falls. Discounting drives GMV up and profit down, so a bad-margin quarter can be an expensive-software quarter.
• Efficiency is not rewarded. If you cut advertising spend by a quarter while holding revenue, a spend-linked fee falls and a GMV-linked fee does not.
• It compounds silently. Nobody re-reads the percentage after year one, and by year three the absolute number can be well beyond anything discussed at signing.

None of that makes GMV pricing improper — it aligns a platform's revenue with your growth, which is a coherent commercial argument and one plenty of buyers accept happily. The mistake is comparing a GMV percentage against an ad-spend percentage as though the units were the same. They are not remotely the same. Convert both to projected dollars at your own three-year forecast before you decide which is cheaper, and run the pessimistic forecast too.

The minimum is the clause to negotiate, not the percentage

In a floor-plus-overage model, buyers instinctively negotiate the percentage. The floor usually matters more, because you pay it whether or not you reach it.

The trap is structural rather than adversarial. Minimums are set from the volume you say you expect to process, and sales conversations reward optimism on both sides — you want the better rate that a higher commitment buys, and the vendor wants the commitment. Then the year turns out ordinary, and you have paid for volume you never processed.

Six things to establish before signing:

• What the minimum is stated in — GMV, advertising spend, or both — and precisely how it is measured and by whom.
• Whether unused commitment rolls forward into the next period or simply expires.
• Whether the floor ratchets on renewal automatically, or is renegotiated each time.
• What the overage percentage is, whether it steps down at higher volumes, and where those steps sit.
• Whether implementation is separate, and what "live" is contractually defined as.
• The notice period to exit, diarised on the day you sign rather than discovered in month eleven.

Run your own downside case: what does this contract cost in a flat year? If that number is uncomfortable, the commitment is too high regardless of how good the rate looks in the growth case.

Check you are shopping in the right category at all

Rithum sells marketplace management, retail media advertising and dropship — listing and feed operations, order and inventory plumbing, and advertising layered over the top. That is a strong offering for a business whose problem is selling across many marketplaces and channels at once.

It is not an Amazon demand-side platform, and buyers occasionally shortlist it as though it were. If what you actually need is programmatic display bought against Amazon's shopping signal, that is a different purchase, with different economics and a different measurement problem. Worth knowing before you budget: per Amazon's own product documentation, registering for the self-service route carries no minimum spend, whereas the managed-service route usually starts at a $50,000 minimum investment that varies by country. Neither figure has anything to do with what a marketplace platform licence costs.

The measurement point applies whichever route you take, and it is the reason this site exists. Last-click attribution cannot prove incrementality. It reports which touch was closest to the purchase, which is not the same question as whether the purchase would have happened anyway. Display is where that gap is widest. The fix is a holdout — withhold display from a matched set of regions or ASINs for a defined window and compare against a control — reconciled in Amazon Marketing Cloud, where DSP and sponsored-ads events stop double-counting each other. Ask any vendor selling you advertising how they would design that. It is a fair question and a revealing one.

Who Rithum suits, and what we do differently

Rithum is the better purchase when your problem is breadth of channel: many marketplaces, dropship relationships with retailers, feed and order operations at scale, and a need to run all of it from one system. The ChannelAdvisor lineage is two decades of marketplace integration work, and that is not something a newer entrant replicates quickly. Buyers with that shape of problem should have it on the list.

Dr. DSP is narrower on purpose. We run Amazon display as a managed product, with no published price: a demo, the first 30 days free, priced on the call against your real media budget and scope, month to month, and Orbit included at no extra cost. There is no minimum commitment to forecast against and no notice period to serve. Every proposal carries three things — the evidence behind it, the measurement plan, and the condition that reverses it — and you choose how much runs without your click. Inventory risk, pricing, new products, new creative and the decision to stop spending on display always come to a human.

Instead of a rate card, a benchmark: across 30 advertisers in July 2026 — not the whole book — 6.04x return on ad spend, 78.4 million impressions at a $4.00 CPM, a blended $1.42 cost per click, $5.49 cost per acquisition on 57,137 attributed purchases, 20.1% new-to-brand. One month of Amazon-attributed data, guaranteed to nobody.

Two redirects. If your Amazon problem is sponsored ads rather than display, Dr. PPC is the right product and publishes its price and its cap. If the money is leaking through stockouts, storage and fees rather than media, Dr. Stock is where that work belongs — and it should be fixed before any advertising budget increases.