A Senate probe launched last fall to look into the ethics and legality of online shopping membership clubs. This week, ChannelAdvisor announced it was dropping its relationship with WebLoyalty, one of the companies being investigated. Among the companies named in the Senate investigation who had participated in such programs were eBay's Half.com site, eBay vendor ChannelAdvisor, as well as Buy.com and Tiger Direct.

Michael Jones, ChannelAdvisor Chief Revenue Officer, said in a statement, "We're in the process of making changes to our checkout to improve the shopping experience for our retailers' customers. As part of those changes, we've decided to terminate the Webloyalty program to enable a better overall customer experience."

On March 24th, ChannelAdvisor made two changes to its checkout flow to adhere to eBay policies.

"First, ChannelAdvisor will be terminating its relationship with Webloyalty and will no longer offer the Rewards Program as part of the ChannelAdvisor checkout. This will not in any way impact ChannelAdvisor customers who did not opt into the Webloyalty program. However, those ChannelAdvisor customers that did opt into the Webloyalty program will be impacted. The Webloyalty option will no longer be available to consumers through your checkout effective after March 31st. ChannelAdvisor will disable this feature programmatically; no changes need to be made on your part.

"Secondly, ChannelAdvisor will be implementing a new method to handle items listed to eBay offering “Free Shipping.” To provide consumers with the best overall checkout experience, the improved flow will identify whether an item was listed on eBay with “Free Shipping.” Items that were marked as “Free Shipping” and do not have a free option selected by default will not have a shipping option selected, requiring the customer to select their desired method of shipping. If a free shipping option is the default shipping option, it will remain selected as it is today."