One of the worst things in the world is waking up to find out that
you've sold the same piece of your product twice
and that's what happens when you don't manage your
inventory between all the shops you sell on online.
That's why in this video today. I'm going to share with you the top four best
Inventory management software you can start using Hi,
my name is Mei Pak. And I help makers artists
and designers make a living selling their handmade products online.
If you're a handmade business selling on multiple platforms
at once like Etsy and Shopify and Amazon and maybe you also do craft shows then managing.
Your inventory is definitely one of the biggest Fiasco's
and it is absolutely crucial to have a clear system.
Okay, because you definitely don't want to oversell on your products.
Right and the more time your items take to me.
Make or the more unique your items are the bigger of a disaster,
right? For example, if you make paintings that are completely one-of-a-kind
or if you make an item that takes you 10 hours to craft
and then one morning you wake
up and see that you've sold two of them and say your policy say you will ship within a day or two.
So you don't have the time to make another of that product to ship it out on time.
This is just a huge problem, right?
So let's talk about how you would manage.
Your inventory when I was starting out.
I tried a lot of different systems and I'm not gonna lie.
I love a cheap solution. I'm all about scrapping together something that works
and I've seen every kind of solution keeping separate inventory
for your Etsy shop and your Shopify shop like making spreadsheets
and these systems can work but there's a couple of problems as soon as you start making more sales.
They'll start falling apart when you make one sale from Etsy.
You have to then run over
and take it out of your spreadsheet
or move some inventory around and depending on the kind of businesses.
You've run it may not even be possible.
So if you make as I said earlier
and item that takes a large large amount of time to create you may not
necessarily have multiple copies of that product.
You can have a separate inventory in each shop.
And so if you're looking for a more hands-off approach
and one that's able to scale up your going to need to bring in some software You might be
wondering what's the big deal if I just have my items up on Shopify
and at see I'm only making a few sales a week.
I'm sure I'm not going to over sell anything.
Well, it's possible to just run your shop risking that you sell something double
and assuming it's not going to happen,
but it's really not a good business practice because first of all if you get caught doing it,
you can run into some really bad customer service situations,
right? So if you sold out of a product
and you want to go make another
but You've run out of a particular material to make that
product and it's going to take two weeks for you to get that material in your in your mailbox.
Now, you're breaking a promise that you've made to a customer
because you're shipping their order later than they expected and that's a really bad situation.
And secondly, you should always be hoping for more sales,
right? So I mean like what if an influencer links to your shop
or tells her followers about you
or one of your featured somewhere
and Magazine or like a Blog and now you're getting slammed with sales.
That's where you're really going to find out that these ad hoc approaches don't work out.
So I recommend you build out your systems
for success and for scaling up and it takes a little more expense,
but I'm going to walk you through your software options
because it's worth having a truly synced Etsy end Shopify inventory.
I'm going to go through four different softwares that I recommend
or that come recommended by other people in our Our creative high
of community that you might want to look into.
So our very first software recommendation is Sinker Sinker Sy Sy
NCR is a Shopify app that integrates with Etsy
and it keeps both of your shops in sync by automatically detecting and sinking stock level changes.
And this is how it works for every software recommendation.
I'm going to give you is saying items sold in your Etsy Shop.
It will note it did not the quantity of your inventory.
Tori by one and have that reflect in your Shopify store
as well and the way the software
knows whether to separate listings on your Etsy
and Shopify store are actually the same item is you give it the
same skew SKU which can be anything you want
like for me and my skew formatting.
I use something simple like neck - one two three.
So if I want the software to link two separate listings
and treat that as really One design that both share the same inventory.
I just give both listings from my separates shops.
The same skew Sinker is a very affordable option starting at only nine dollars a month,
but it's also one of the more basic software's if you need something that has more
features stay on to watch the rest of this video number 2.
We have trunk TR U. NK trunk is another Shopify app.
That's very similar to Sinker. The main difference is true.
Like can also sync with other platforms.
So it sinks with Etsy Amazon Shopify eBay fair.
If you do wholesale square and square space,
so if you sell in more than just Etsy and Shopify,
then you might want to check this out.
Also, it can manage the bundling and kidding of goods together,
which I don't think singer can do. So,
for example, let's say you sell soaps
and you make a cinnamon soap goat milk soap
and an Earl Grey soap and now So you have 10 of each of those designs or separate products great.
Okay, you have 30 soaps in inventory right now.
If you want to sell a gift bundle of each of those three flavors of soap or sense of soap.
You're in an inventory pickle, right?
Because you list a Nazi listing that's a bundle that uses one of each soap.
Now you're in the situation where you have one bundle
and you have to decrease your Other soap inventories to nine pieces
because the bundle is accounting for one of each soap.
Right? But really it's the same bars of soap sitting there on your shelf.
You still physically have 10 pieces of soap each.
Now, let's say you sold your bundle and now it looks like you sold out on bundles.
Well, that's not really true because you still have nine soaps of each type sitting on your shelf.
So you actually need to just move that inventory over to your bundles.
Ding so you can see how this could be a problem depending on what types of products you sell.
For example a tiny hands.
I sell a create your own charm bracelet.
You can choose your own charms and you can pick between three to five charms for your bracelet.
This listing itself is really just an empty shell that doesn't really have any inventory
but then if someone chooses that they want a cupcake charm a cookie
and a waffle charm for their bracelet my inventory management system needs
Need to know to deduct one of each my cupcake cookie
and Waffle charms you see how that works.
And so trunk is designed to manage kidding
and bundling as well as sinking inventory between
Etsy and Shopify trunk is $29 a month at the time of the recording and offers a 14-day free trial.
Number three. We have Crafty base crafty base is actually both an inventory
and bookkeeping system that integrates with Etsy
and Shopify and Commerce so crafty base is specifically designed
for handmade Sellers and what's nice about it is it allows you to keep track of
your materials in addition to completed inventory
items so I can say for me making sent it necklaces the chains and charms.
I keep a separate items, right?
So if you buy just a charm I don't need to remove a necklace chain from my inventory.
But if you buy a charm necklace, then you can deduct the inventory on both the
charm and the chain and so keeping track of those raw materials might be an
important step in keeping track of your entire business.
If you make items that are composed of a lot of different pieces,
you can then keep those pieces in inventory as well.
So for me, I could even put in my polymer clay colors in inventory
as a raw product and then keep track of how I'm using them up as I go.
So when I run out of a particular material,
I'll know I can no longer. All the products that use that material
and I'll be notified to go order more of that material.
So that's a more advanced type of inventory management software.
It also allows you to do accounting.
So you cannot calculate the cost of goods sold and other fancy pricing things like that.
So the software is obviously designed
for more than just the simple Inventory management like we were talking about Personally,
I don't need that granular level of tracking
but I do have very specific needs of linking products together by skus
and that's not something every software
does so you should explore
whether you would use these other functionalities before deciding
whether it's the right one for you.
But if these jive with what works for your business,
then this could be a really good solution crafty base charges a
monthly fee starting at nine dollars a month,
but it goes up from there based on what different Jurors,
you're getting number four cell bright.
So bright is software that integrates with a lot of other platforms
as well like Etsy Amazon Shopify eBay woocommerce
and a lot more what makes Sal bright different from the other
recommendations is cell bright also comes with shipping features.
So you can ship orders and by postage directly from the software.
I've tested this briefly myself,
but they don't have the bundling and kitting features which are really important to me.
Me so I can't use it but it is a nice all in one software.
If you want to have just one Consolidated place to check inventory and do shipping all in one.
So obviously when you sell an item you now have to ship it which
for a lot of us means some other kind of third-party kind of app like with using indicia
or pirate ship or ships station.
There are lots of other shipping software's out
there and depending on how many orders you ship they usually charge a monthly fee
for it as well so self It allows you to do the inventory management by Postage and ship orders.
As of this recording. They have a free plan that can support you up to 30 orders a month.
If you ship more than that, then it starts at $19 a month which might be a better solution for you.
If you have to count together both the cost of inventory management software and shipping software.
There are other software's out there like e-comm - Vico that's ve que o finale inventory tradegecko.
So multi orders and or door. Oh,
but the reason I'm not spending a whole lot of time on these is because they're super expensive.
For example, I've been using
or D'oro for about three years
now and they do both Inventory management
and shipping in one as well like celebrate
and the reason I use order o is
because they links cues together very
well and they also do bundling and kitting which are both very important features for me,
but I pay 300 dollars a month and that's at a grandfather price point now,
they just emailed me a few months ago saying they need to start charging me.
Now what they charge everyone else which is 500 a month.
And I just don't think it's worth that much at that point.
So I'm actually going back to the basics
and just hiring a programmer to code
up for me some automations its costs a few hundred dollars up front.
But that way I don't have to pay a recurring fee every month and for shipping orders.
I'm going to go back to using Good Old Ship station,
which was what I was using before or door.
Oh and I really loved using that so as your business grows,
you will likely be paying more to help manage the admin side of your business.
But there will sometimes come a point where you'll want to cut on costs and in my case.
It just didn't make sense anymore to pay 500 dollars
for something that I could do for a tenth of the price with my own custom solution.