1. What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?

Rob van Nuenen: Channable started in Utrecht in 2014 as a pivot from our first company where we created mobile versions of websites/webshops. Our customers were looking for a solution to get the same data as we gathered from their shops to channels such as Google. That’s how we landed on feed management. We saw online retailers needed a way to get their products listed accurately across hundreds of channels without building bespoke integrations for each one. The Netherlands turned out to be a surprisingly good place to build this. It’s one of the most advanced eCommerce markets in Europe, which meant we had demanding, technically literate customers pushing us from day one.
What makes us different now isn’t just down to one feature. We’re not a point solution for feeds or a point solution for ads or marketplaces. We’re the platform that sits in the middle so we connect brands’ product data to Google, Amazon, Meta, TikTok, price comparison sites, and AI discovery channels, all from one place. Since we’ve now been doing this for over a decade, our data infrastructure is one of the richest in the industry. When AI agents like Gemini or Perplexity are making purchase recommendations, they’re pulling from the same structured product data we’ve been helping brands maintain for years. Our clients, without doing anything extra, are already building for that future.
We’re also genuinely channel-agnostic. We’re not owned by a platform, we don’t earn commission on your ad spend, and we’re not trying to push you toward any particular channel. That independence is rarer than you’d think.

2. Since launch, what have been the 1-2 real turning points for your brand-specific decisions, pivots, or experiments that noticeably changed your growth or profitability-and what did you learn from them?

Rob van Nuenen: The first one was having to make hard decisions including saying no to customers. Like any startup that needs revenue, we said yes to nearly every feature request and customisation asked. The turning point was realising that trying to be everything to everyone was slowing us down. We made a deliberate choice to focus on the mid-market – that is ecommerce brands, online retailers and digital media agencies with real multichannel complexity who want a product they can pick up and use, not a consultancy-led implementation. That focus is still the backbone of how we build.
The second turning point was the acquisitions. In 2024 we acquired WakeupData and in 2025 we acquired Producthero, the number one Google CSS partner in Europe. These weren’t just geographic or customer-base plays. Producthero brought us deep Google Shopping specialisation and a CSS capability that genuinely changes the unit economics for brands running Shopping ads. That capability, together with feed management, marketplace integration, and creative automation on a single platform enables us to be a genuine multichannel commerce platform.

3. Which 2-3 channels drive most of your revenue right now (for example SEO, paid social, email, marketplaces, influencers), and what have you learned about making those channels work in your category?

Rob van Nuenen: For Channable, our revenue is driven by three engines. The core is a subscription model where brands and agencies pay based on the volume of SKUs they manage through the platform. Our agency channel is the second engine: over 1,300 agencies use Channable to run multichannel operations for their clients, which means our growth compounds through their client base, not just direct sales. The third, and newest, is our Google CSS business, significantly expanded through the Producthero acquisition, where brands recover margin on every Google Shopping transaction by routing through our CSS.
For the brands using our platform, their sales come from different channels. Google Shopping is the dominant performance channel for most of our customers. Even as AI search grows, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews are surfacing products via Shopping data, so optimising for Google means you are also optimising for AI driven discovery.
Paid social, particularly Meta, is the second major lever for brands. The shift toward image-based ads is real and accelerating so brands feeding high-quality, channel-specific creative into Meta’s systems are outperforming those still running static or generic product images.
Marketplaces are third and those that prioritise ruthlessly are performing the best. The brands that do well pick two or three where their category actually performs, go deep, and hold everything else. Spreading across too many at once ,with all the order and returns management,compliance, and content requirements each one brings, is one of the most consistent mistakes we see.
There is a thread connecting all three and that is data quality, Channel breadth without data quality is waste. The brands outperforming right now aren’t on the most channels, they’re the ones building on a solid data foundation. By having complete, accurate and consistently structured product data, and relying on a platform like Channable to automate the heavy lifting, they can shift their focus away from feed maintenance to executing their commercial strategy.

4. How are you thinking about search in 2026 – Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, and other discovery platforms? What, if anything, have you changed in your content or site to stay visible as AI search grows?

Rob van Nuenen: The most important thing we’ve changed is how we advise our customers, because what works for them is also the best signal of what works in practice.
One area where we’ve stayed consistent, for ourselves and across the board, is our conviction that Google remains the primary discovery layer. Maintaining strong Google Shopping performance is still the single highest-leverage thing most eCommerce brands can do in 2026.
For our customer base, we’re in a transition. One thing that is clear is that AI agents (Gemini, Perplexity and ChatGPT shopping features) are increasingly making product recommendations on behalf of users, and they rely on structured, trusted data to do it. The same attributes that make your products rank well in Google Shopping are the attributes that make AI systems confident enough to recommend you. We call this “Attribute Density” which is the degree to which your product data is rich, specific, and accurate enough that a machine can understand exactly what you sell and who it’s for.
One way our thinking has already changed is that we’ve stopped treating AI search as a separate workstream. If a brand’s data is clean, complete, and consistently structured, they’re already building for AI discovery without a dedicated GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) project. The tooling to measure AI search visibility is still maturing, but the signal is consistent: better data means better visibility.

5. What do you do to turn first‑time buyers into repeat customers and advocates? Are there specific experiences, content, or community touches that work especially well for you?

Rob van Nuenen: The single most important thing we’ve learned is that retention comes from value realisation. If a customer isn’t getting meaningful results from the platform, no amount of onboarding emails or check-in calls will keep them. So the first thing we invest in is making sure customers actually get value quickly, through Channable Academy, our free self-serve learning resource with 20+ video courses, and through dedicated Customer Success Managers for customers who need a more hands-on path in.
For our agency partners specifically, community has been the real driver of advocacy. Over 1,500 agencies use Channable, and genuine advocates feel like they are shaping the product with us, not just using it. We run product roundtables, invite agency partners into beta features before they launch, and hold an annual Agency Partner Day that brings together 220+ agencies from across Europe and the US. That event has become something people genuinely look forward to – it’s less a product demo and more a room full of people who have built real businesses on the platform, sharing what’s working.
The content that converts most reliably is specific and practical with use cases, benchmark data, and “here’s what the best performers are doing differently” framing. Trend reports and expert interviews help, but what really builds loyalty is when customers feel like you’re giving them an edge they couldn’t get elsewhere.

6. If you had to write a short playbook for an ecommerce founder one stage behind you, what would you double down on over the next 12 months – and what would you stop doing entirely?

Rob van Nuenen:
We were lucky to start in the Netherlands, which turns out to be one of the most advanced ecommerce markets in the world but we didn’t know that when we started. However, luck only gets you so far so I would advise founders to double down on execution discipline, specifically around long-term choices.

Think about what this space will look like in two years and where you need to be. It’s an uncomfortable thought when you’re still in survival mode, but it’s the one that forces the right decisions – including the hard ones, like saying no to customers. If you are saying yes to everything because you need the revenue today, it’s not always good for indirect revenue in the long run.