The best inventory management software automates most of the complex tasks, taking manual errors out of the equation.
This increases efficiency and hence, positively influences your bottom line.
The Sourcingbro team has handpicked 5 options for you from the overcrowded Shopify Marketplace.
We will also touch on the factors that influenced our decision to choose these over the competition.
So stay with us.
What are the Best Inventory Management Software for Shopify?
There’s no one-size fits all in ecommerce software. To that end, we have picked 5 different inventory management software for you to try this year.
- Skubana -Best App for Multi Sales Channel Businesses
- Skulabs – Inventory Management with Fulfillment
- Inventory Planner – Best Inventory Forecasting software
- Skuvault – Cloud Based Inventory Management with a flexible API
- Veeqo – Best option for small businesses with low sales volumes
1. Skubana
Best App for Multi Sales Channel Businesses
Skubana is a fully-loaded inventory management suite that allows medium-to-large businesses to consolidate order and inventory management, regardless of where they sell.
Ecommerce, wholesale, Brick and Mortar stores and marketplaces like Amazon & eBay, all your warehouses, 3PLs & point of sale systems can be managed from the Skubana dashboard.
It’s like having one central system to control multiple sales channels, each with their own distribution networks.
In normal circumstances, this would be an extremely cumbersome, and tricky model to manage, purely because of the sheer volume of data you will encounter. But Skubana manages to simplify it down into easy bits of information.
That’s just scraping the surface of what’s possible with Skubana.
Key Features:
1. Automation Galore
We love the power and speed that automation brings to the table, particularly when it is as effective as Skubana is.
There’s so many tasks, both simple and complex ones that can be automated with the software.
You can assign repetitive tasks to ‘Order Bots’ that will fulfill it like clockwork. For instance, selecting the fastest or cost effective warehouse to distribute your inventory to. Or analyzing your inventory ordering pattern to predict volume.
This helps you prevent overstocking, which is a challenge for brands with limited capital.
2. Unifying Multiple Sales Channels
If you sell on different marketplaces or have different sales channels, then Skubana brings it all together.
Think about how difficult it would be to maintain different databases for all your vendors, warehouses, and product types. Surprisingly, Skubana makes this effortless.
The multi-channel dashboard shows you all the vital bits of information in percentages and graphs where applicable. As unbelievable as it sounds, you can keep track of stock levels, stay updated about incoming stock and get alerts for inventory that needs your supervision.
By the way, all your team members can get access to the same dashboard with custom roles and permissions.
3. Tons of Data
Granular data is a term loosely thrown around in the ecommerce industry. Skubana magnifies this, taking it one notch further.
The software crunches every tiny bit of information at its disposal and throws out some real actionable information.
How much money have you saved with Skubana?
What are some of the opportunities that you are missing out on?
What frequency should you re-order at?
There’s a lot of automatic data generation on offer.
Pricing:
Skubana offers a custom-pricing model. But their base pricing is $999 for 1000 orders. So, it’s not cheap. But we said at the onset that this is better suited for medium to large sized businesses.
Our thoughts about Skubana:
Highly recommended if you have multiple-sales channels and are a fast-growing business losing sleep over inventory management. If you are a small business, keep reading. We have more options for you.
2. Skulabs
Inventory Management with Fulfillment
Skulabs is a cloud-based software suite that offers solutions for most backend tasks in an ecommerce business. This includes order management, shipping management, picking and packing, inventory management, warehouse and catalog management to name a few.
Don’t be surprised if you find Skulabs recommended in any one of these categories. The suite has an extensive feature list and packs a punch with most of the services. In this article, we will focus solely on the inventory management part of Skulabs, which is one of its mainstays.
Just like Skubana, Skulabs offers support for multi-sales channel operations. But it’s not solely limited to enterprises. This is a very flexible service that works equally well for small and medium sized businesses.
Key Features:
1. Easy Inventory Tracking
Skulabs automates one of the most complex tasks, even for small businesses. That’s keeping track of inventory across multiple warehouse locations, and based on real-time order processing from multiple sales channels.
As each order is processed, the software updates inventory levels in real-time. The dashboard gives you a one-glance view of the number of skus sold, shows alerts for skus that need your attention, and then predicts inventory flow to help you plan reorders.
2. Accurate Automated counts
If your warehouse team desists manual inventory counts, we don’t blame them. With Skulabs, you get automated cycle counts which are more efficient and accurate. This saves time, effort and money.
- Time, because each portion of your stored inventory is counted in one cycle. This lets you perform multiple cycled counts each month.
- Effort, because it’s not manual, exhaustive counting
- Money, because keeping track of inventory with cycled counts prevents inventory shrinkage. You know exactly what’s coming in and going out, leaving no scope for theft or damage to eat into your profits.
3. Prediction for Reorders
A lot of small businesses are unaware that predicting reorders can help you save money in more ways than one. For instance, Skulabs can accurately predict the amount of inventory that you should ideally be stocking. At the same time, it can help prevent over-orders by tracking the existing inventory that’s not selling as expected.
4. Grouping Items
Skulabs allows businesses to group items together as kits or bundles for more accurate tracking across sales channels. This is a seamless way to track multi-quantity as well as multi-product listings without any discrepancies in volume.
Pricing:
Skulabs has three pricing tiers. The basic one is priced at $499 per month for up to 2500 orders, the pro plan at $799 for up to 5000 orders and there’s an enterprise plan which has a custom quote. There’s no cap on the orders or number of team members in this plan.
Our thoughts about Skulabs:
Skulabs offers a more SMB friendly pricing model, while covering all the basics of inventory management.
3. Inventory Planner
Best Inventory Forecasting software
Most Inventory management software these days try to offer all-encompassing services. But unless they are a large brand, they can rarely offer comprehensive features in all the touchpoints in ecommerce sales fulfillment.
That’s why Inventory Planner manages to stand out. They don’t claim to do everything under the sun. Instead, their forte is prediction and forecasting, with the basics of inventory management thrown in to the mix.
The software will help you keep track of stock, generate POs and integrate multiple channels. But the standout is their ability to accurately spot trends and forecast what works.
If you are struggling with inventory and sales forecasting, but do not want to invest in a loaded CRM app for Shopify yet, then this will get the job done at a fraction of the cost.
Key Features:
1. Decisions Driven by Forecasting
Inventory Planner has one of the best revenue forecasting modules we’ve tested, which helps to prevent roll-of-the-dice investments.
Your business decisions are based on solid rationale and data, rather than intuition.
This is a proven way to keep a tight leash on your inventory spending. You prevent overstocking, and hence are less likely to be caught with dead stock. Instead, you will invest only in products, categories and suppliers that offer you a distinct price advantage.
This is also very useful for planning markups in price, well in advance.
2. Basic & Advanced KPIS
It’s rare to come across an inventory management software that offers detailed KPIs like Inventory Planner does.
This is generally offered in the best Shopify report app. But with Inventory planner, you can instantly narrow down on the products/categories that’s your key revenue generator.
Also, you can generate revenue KPIs for varied metrics like turnover, markup, and stock cost, even for past sales days.
We really like the feature that allows you to compare inventory performance by date ranges. This lets you compares sales and spot trends and variations even within a single day.
3. Overstock
Overstock is every ecommerce businesses’ bane. But one that’s difficult to avoid. Rather than flushing your hard earned money down the drain, or taking a massive cut in profits to deal with overstock, Inventory Planner suggests how you can clear it off by sending traffic, adding a promotional discount or moving it up the product category.
The overstock module gives you access to 180+ metrics that you can use to filter your stock. For example, a filter that shows you how much revenue is locked currently in overstock.
Pricing:
Inventory Planner uses a dynamic pricing model that varies depending on the number of active Skus to track, the number of integrations you wish to connect (max 10), and the number of warehouses that you need to track. The base price is $99/mo for up to 1000 SKUs, one integration and one warehouse, which works great for small businesses. The price keeps increasing as you scale your business.
Our thoughts about Inventory Planner:
Great tools for predictive analysis and forecasting. Also, the $99/mo starting price is very appealing for small stores and one-man startups.
4. Skuvault
Cloud Based Inventory Management with a flexible API
Skuvault offers brands with a hands-off solution for post-order ecommerce management. It includes inventory and order management, supply chain management, pick & pack and shipping. In addition to this, it has a dedicated module for Amazon FBA inventory management.
Subscribers get access to tons of one-click integrations, allowing easy multi-sales channel management. But in case you need a custom integration, they have a flexible API that’s equally easy to integrate with. You should be up and running in no time at all.
Key Features:
1. Automated Routing
Skuvault automates order routing and inventory distribution to provide you with the fastest and most cost-effective solution. This is done taking into account sales trends in key marketplaces and their proximity to warehouses.
2. 5-Minute Updates
Skuvault keeps track of inventory across multiple sales channels and warehouses. Moreover, this inventory syncing is updated every 5-minutes. So, there’s very little chance of out-of-stock orders because of incorrect quantities in live listings. This also includes inventory levels in Amazon FBA warehouses by the way. All the details are easily visible on the dashboard.
3. Buffers
Skuvault allows you to use preset buffers while communicating inventory levels with sales channels and marketplaces. For instance, if you set a ‘Low Quantity Cutoff‘ buffer, it displays in real time on your sales channels that the product is in limited quantity. This creates a sense of urgency and helps push the customers faster through the sales cycle.
4. Easy Supplier Management
With a comprehensive supply chain management feature set, Skuvault allows you to manage and track suppliers from the dashboard. You can track supplier costs, as well as generate performance reports, which can help you make better business decisions. Syncing inventory data across warehouses, gives you a one-glance view of the current inventory levels for both, underperforming and bestselling products.
Pricing:
Skuvault has three pricing plans. The growth plan is priced at $269/month and tracks up to 2000 orders/mo for 2 users. The Pro plan is their most popular one that lets businesses track up to 5000 orders. This is priced at $409/month.
Lastly, there’s the enterprise plan at $809/month for up to 20000 orders. All orders offer unlimited integrations though, which is great.
Our thoughts about Skuvault:
If you are looking for a single software that can manage all your post-sales touchpoints, then Skuvault might be a good option. But if you seek only the best inventory management software for Shopify, then it comes across as an overpriced solution.
5. Veeqo
Best option for small businesses with low sales volumes
Veeqo is a UK-based ecommerce management company that offers one of the most robust inventory management software in the industry currently. Well, their software is all-inclusive and inventory management is just one part of it.
If you seek more options under one roof, or software so to say, then Veeqo can be that option. While their services are on par with the rest of the software in this list, it is the stellar rating amongst existing customers, and top rated customer service that helped it edge out more popular choices. Not that we are disappointed one bit with the services on offer.
Key Features:
1. Multi-Channel Inventory Management
Veeqo is a terrific option for managing inventory across multiple sales channels. You can keep track of inventory across platforms and warehouses with close to real time syncs. Regardless of whether you are a small business learning the ropes, or a large operation with thousands of SKUS, Veeqo makes it easy to track inventory.
2. Automated Workflows with Easy Rules
Veeqo lets you automate repetitive, but complex tasks that would eat into hundreds of valuable man hours. You can set easy rules with as many varied triggers as you’d want to, for an automated workflow. For instance, what happens to an order based on the product weight or product value? Rout orders to specific warehouses based on destination addresses and so on.
3. Sync Orders from Physical Stores
Veeqo also lets businesses with physical stores sync orders across online and offline sales channels. It offers one-click access to Shopify POS or Vend point of sale.
Pricing:
Veeqo’s pricing plans are dynamic and based on the number of orders you generate. The base plan called Accelerator is priced at just $48/month (billed annually) for businesses generating 50 sales. The pricing keeps increasing as your sales volume increases. The pricing also varies for UK/EU based business by the way.
Our thoughts about Veeqo:
Veeqo’s low entry level barrier makes it a good choice for small businesses who wish to leverage the power of a fully-loaded software suite without spending a bomb.
At the same time, there’s ample room for scaling. Veeqo is well-equipped to handle thousands of orders a month. Don’t forget that their customer service is top rated.
How to Select the Best Inventory Management Software for Shopify
It would be far-fetched to label a particular inventory management software as bad, or poor. Instead, we look at software as something that works for our business or not. That’s the yardstick we use to measure the effectiveness of a software. That’s exactly what you should consider too.
Here’s a brief checklist that you can use to compare any software for Shopify that you select.
1. How easy is the onboarding process?
This is particularly important when you are migrating from one software to the other. Onboarding must be effortless with multiple, flexible import options. Ideally, someone from the customer service team should guide you along the way until everything is set up to your satisfaction.
2. Does it offer multi-sales channel syncing?
If you have an ecommerce business on multiple sales platforms, you need a software that offers seamless inventory syncing across these platforms. Some key features to watch out for are:
- One click integrations for common platforms
- API access for custom integrations
- Real Time syncing for inventory levels based on order processing
- Syncing with POS for businesses with brick and mortar outlets
3. Does it offer warehouse management?
Inventory management is incomplete without warehouse management. So look for a software that syncs seamlessly with your warehouse management solution or 3PL fulfillment software.
It should automatically track inventory levels across warehouses, offer optimized order routing to warehouses, automate reordering based on sales tracking, and allow services like grouping for easy tracking.
Cycled counting is a great add-on. But it’s not mandatory.
4. Automated workflows
One of the major motivators for switching to a dedicated inventory management software is to automate repetitive, labor-intensive tasks. So automating workflows based on custom rules and triggers is a must have feature for us.
5. Predictive analytics, forecasting and reporting
As your ecommerce operation grows, you will find it tricky to plan your inventory stocks in advance. Sometimes you will be stuck with dead stock, while on other occasions, you will be under stocked with no vendor able to deliver the inventory on time.
A robust predictive and forecasting module keeps you covered in such instances. Not only does it bring precision into inventory ordering, it also allows you to keep track of key inventory KPIs.
To Sum it up
The best inventory management for Shopify is the one that offers the most advantageous set of features for your business. If you are a small business that only generates a few sales a month, look for an option with a low entry level barrier.
On the other hand, if you are a high-growth business, look for an enterprise grade solution that offers you the best customer service and competitive pricing.
If you wish to know how we help our clients manage inventory seamlessly, reach out to us and find out more.
Further Reading:
