Help and advice please!

[Mart Ensi]

Morning all,

Looking for any advice and input please.
In this crazy new world we are now living in, I am having to look hard at the costs of running the business and the fundamentals of how we do it.

In essence I am looking to change my stock control system,to a cloud based system that either has an accounts feature built in, or has seamless integration with one of the packages out there.Ideally it would simple and straightforward to use.

We run a B2B part of the business, a bricks and mortar retail shop and 1 trade and 2 retail websites on Magento We also currently have an Etsy channel and on 2 smaller niche platforms ( So not Amazon or EBay - currently at least)
It has become clear that the online channels have become more important ,so I need software that will link to all the channels to avoid constant stock update issues.
Does anyone have any recommendations or thoughts on how to approach this issue?

Many thanks in advance!

 

[apricot]

I can't recommend one but I can tell you which one to stay away. Channel Grabber! Totally waste of time and money.

I do recommend not to invest in stock control software before know how your sales go overall with all channels. We started the eCommerce business with the same plan but the only channel that we end up selling was Amazon and Website. We closed all the other channels as it was not worth it. No need to stock control as it is not a problem to manage two places. You may end of up the same.

 

[Pish_Pash]

You may not like this answer...but I'd recommend you build your own system (ok, perhaps not you personally, but pay someone).

To give you an example...I started sellling on my own website/Ebay, then on Amazon...ok...no problem I used Linnworks (had both those covered) ...problem with Linnworks it's not an accounts package, so now you're looking for something to link tLinnworks & your accounts package (so straight off the bat, you are using a best in class order managment system...but it doesn't do what you need as a businessman)...fast forward a few years, & I became an Amazon Vendor...whole new way of working - one which Linnworks doesn't cater for (although there are other companies offer packages for Vendors)...so now you've got several plates on the end of sticks...none are well integrated.

So, it your setup is quite diverse & likely to get more diverse...a bespoke system is the way to go.

 

[Mr D]

Agreed, gets complicated then something that meets your requirements fully is going to work better than off the shelf service.
Plus watch out for land mines and poor companies.

With ebay, amazon plus 2 websites of our own I looked at stock control software a few years back.

Of the two that I found that met my requirements one didn't bother doing any work - I had to chase them constantly and the date kept being pushed back and back for going live...
The other stuck a condition in the contract besides the fees that I knew about and had discussed with the sales staff - they also wanted a percentage of turnover. I thought the few hundred pounds a month was reasonable for the service.
Buried in the small print - and would have cost a considerable sum if I had signed the contract.
Missed it on first 2 run throughs, thats how buried it was.

 

[Pish_Pash]

if all the OP requires is a stock control system for all his channels, it's really not *that* difficult...it just needs a basic database that gets updated with your stock purchases, sales & returns.

Something like MS access and someone who knows what they're doing will see you up & running in no time at all.

I had a epiphany moment for tracking my own stock when I read this...

http://allenbrowne.com/AppInventory.html

...which looks like a lot of techie detail, but in essence what he describes is just two tables within a database...one being a stock take count (a date where you physically eyeballed/counted all your stock - an absolute count in other words) & the other being a deduction (sales) or an increment (returns) from that known stock count date (a relative count in other words).

Hiring someone on peopleperhour or fivver to knock up your own stock tracking system is the way to go in my opinion