Nowadays, more and more businesses are coming online; sellers are trying to connect with local and international buyers through online eCommerce platforms like Shopify. These eCommerce platforms are making life easy for the sellers who are struggling to sell their products offline.

One most important thing you need to make your eCommerce business successful is reliable and advanced inventory management software. If your store is on Shopify, you must have heard about the Zoho inventory management tool. Today, we will discuss Zoho inventory reviews, benefits, and other alternatives you can consider for your online store.

Table of Contents

Overview of an Inventory Management

To sell on the eCommerce platforms, you have to do proper inventory management and update it regularly with every order. Through inventory management, companies will know how much stock they have left, product by product.

Why is Inventory Management Important?

Inventory management helps track down inventory from purchasing to selling; through this management, you can identify which one of your products is low on stock and be updated regarding your sales. It will give you a proper warning about the shortage of any product so that you can be one step ahead.

It will help you calculate your monthly sale; good inventory management gives your sales data of a particular period. If you don’t measure your inventory, then there is a good chance that you’ll get more than the required stock, which will cost you money and reduce your cash flow. No company wants low sales and more stock; bad inventory management will lead to unsold and deadstock.

Some software will help you manage your inventory without any trouble; one of them is Zoho inventory management software.

Zoho Inventory Management Software

Overview

Zoho inventory management software covers all your business requirements like your marketing, emails, CRM, application builder, project management etc. Zoho Inventory offers features in bulk, but the inventory management tools are ultimate; you will get automation and other helpful tools which will save you a lot of time. Here are some features of the Zoho Inventory:

Features:

  • Seamless CRM integration

Zoho’s Customer Relationship Management integration allows connecting with all your customers and potential customers through various apps on a single platform. With the help of Zoho CRM, you will spend more time in developing your business instead of managing these apps.

  • Tools for tracking inventory and customer experience

Zoho offers a unique tracking system for your inventory and customer experience; you can track every product individually by the unique serial numbers generated by it. Zoho Inventory allows you to track the shipment through multiple stages, from making the product to the delivery.

  • Quick and Convenient integration with huge range of software products

You can integrate a lot of software stress-free with Zoho like marketplace shopping cart, accounting, analytics, sales and marketing, shipping integration, shipment tracking, payment services and a lot more. All of your work will be at one destination with Zoho easy integration.

  • Workflow tools for human resources and marketing

You can sync all your accounts, contacts, vendors and product information seamlessly. All your customer profiles are automatically generated inside Zoho, where you can take care of all your human resources. With the help of Zoho CRM and google shopping, you can manage multiple activities in a single place.

  • Easy to use interface

Zoho Inventory’s easy to navigate platform has many valuable features; you can easily access all the features with just a few clicks. Their interface is so clean and simple that anyone can manage this module easily.

  • Works with Amazon, eBay and Shopify accounts

Through multiple portals, you can expand the possibilities for your business. By integrating Zoho inventory, you can grow your audience from local to international. You can connect all of these selling channels like Amazon, Shopify, and eBay accounts with a single portal that will show you the growth, sold products, stock details, and many other things in a graphical way.

Pros:

  • The best CRM for customization

Zoho integration gives you the ultimate CRM experience, which is easy to use. It can easily connect all your day to day required software to the inventory panel, where you can manage all of them with a single home screen.

  • Integrate all the elements of customer/prospect interaction

The best thing about Zoho is that you can manage all the customer-related interaction here, all the tracking details from the production of the product to the shipping, step by step.

  • Workflow Tools that address: marketing, projects, social, customer service, emailing marketing, inventory, human resources management, etc.

Through this panel, you will get many helpful workflow tools like marketing automation software that will help you manage activities on multiple social channels. These automation tools will help you in generating leads and converting them into customers.

With email marketing software, you can engage with more audiences through customized messages and automated emails. Zoho inventory will show you all the product by product date related products as well as sales.

  • Track interaction from webinars.

Zoho webinars, here you can register and learn more about Zoho inventory and the wide range of features they offer.

  • Other modules to address company needs.

Here on Zoho, you will get helpful software to address company needs, like inventory control, warehouse management, multi-channel selling order fulfilment and insights reports.

  • Create Custom Workflows and Fields for Contact Management

As you know, you can create custom workflows on Zoho; these workflows can be designed step by step for specific situations for day to day automation. When you trigger any designed workflow, it performs the already arranged actions automatically. All of this process is simple to execute, and the user-friendly interface of Zoho makes it more impressive.

  • Especially easy to find communications.

With the syncing capability of Zoho CRM, you can gain easy access to find your contacts, vendors and customers with order details.

  • Get real time insights about your leads, deals and clients.

On Zoho Inventory Panel, you can track the growth of products you have listed so far or the growth of a particular product over a particular period of time to understand which offer and deal is working best for you and which is not.

  • Synchronization with other Zoho products and external systems to create and manage a connected workflow.

With Zoho, you get limitless possibilities to grow your business as you can integrate your store with other useful Zoho products like email software, automation, cloud-based accounting software, Order Management Software, Warehouse Management, Inventory Tracking Software, etc. Using these tools, you can automate the workflow to save your time and efforts along with improving your growth.

  • Create custom application integrations using the Available API

According to your customer’s interests and requirements, you can create custom applications using the Zoho app builder that lets you create apps by using any programming language for millions of Zoho users.

  • Straightforwardly create custom workflows and approvals with Blueprint Feature

Zoho offers you an automatic visual modelling module to create custom workflows as per your customers’ requirements. Using the Blueprint option/feature, you can set every stage of your support process so that every time you trigger any workflow. It will automatically perform the setup action.

  • Process Management and Operations are Powerful.
  • Impressive Self-Service Portals
  • Zoho has multiple price plans designed to cater needs of all business types.
  • A simple and affordable all-in-one solution.
  • Keep improving and updating their products.
  • Product design and functionality is outstanding.
  • Zoho considers people’s feedback to make their products and tools better for businesses.
  • Very intuitive and easy to use
  • Competitive Price Plans.
  • Rather good customer support.
  • No limit to the Zoho platform.
  • Let you connect with G-Suite and other crucial connectivity and storage apps.
  • Can be customized according to business or industry type.
  • As Zoho comes with multiple upgraded plans, it can last for a business without shifting over to other technology.
  • Users can scale their business by opting to upgrade the price plan as their needs increase.
  • Very affordable.
  • Allow remote working through mobile client features.
  • Clean, intuitive and easy to use mobile interface.
  • Let you schedule and follow up clients, meetings and calls.
  • Sales methodology is easy to curate and manage.
  • You can easily view and track pipelines to check followup status.
  • One-Click Drill down feature saves time and effort.
  • Let you create your own reports along with providing required reports.
  • Amazing workflow tools.
  • Functionality for Mail merges and email templates.
  • One-stop platform for all types of businesses.
  • Its paid price plans are designed to meet the demand of growing businesses.
  • Least expensive CRM that comes with an advanced set of features for different business types.
  • Strong competitor amongst the biggest CRMS available in the market.
  • Extremely customizable
  • Available programming interface (Creator) lets a company develop powerful customization and automation.
  • Search functionality is a strength.
  • Let you categorise, rank and analyze potential leads.
  • Let you view and track all your leads and opportunities by stage and status.
  • Manage your business all in one place.
  • Easy to Manage Dashboards
  • Using its detailed analytics and sales reports, you can manage all the aspects of sales campaigns, communications and revenue.
  • Recruitment process is very friendly.
  • Highly flexible.
  • Immediately start saving time on handling leads.
  • Add accounting and help desk functionality

Cons:

  • Tutorials can be improved a bit.
  • You need Zoho adviser during the implementation process as it is quite complex.
  • Has inconsistent and quite complicated integration that can be too techie for beginners sometimes.
  • Not all products of Zoho CRM are at the same polished level.
  • The AI assistant seems insignificant at some points.
  • You need an active internet connection for its operations.
  • Customer Support needs improvement.
  • Documentation and help videos are too technical and complex at some points.
  • Clear understanding of your needs is required to identify which Zoho modules will be suitable for your business.
  • Events (appointments) are automatically marked as closed as the date arrives which could be problematic in some scenarios.
  • Scheduling a call on Zoho is a hectic process.
  • Very few options are available in the reminder feature. It needs more options like 1 week, 2, weeks, etc.
  • The Fonts are too big
  • Customer support requires improvement and fast response.
  • No Chatbot
  • Forms still lack landing pages.
  • Starting a chat with customer support is a cumbersome process.
  • Lacks document tracking feature for proposals and presentations.
  • In Automation, Sales inside tools are required which are currently lacking on the platform.
  • You cannot track individual email and its opening status in case of mass email marketing campaign
  • Lacks smart tools for form filling so you have to manually input everything.
  • Top tier pricing can be useless for businesses who require less operations.
  • The live chat option is not upto the mark.
  • Needs functionality for bulk email or scheduling

Common Issues With Shopify Inventory Management

Shopify is a famous eCommerce platform used by many small businesses to sell their offline products online because of its simple and easy-to-manage interface. You don’t require much technical knowledge to understand its tools and implement them. But like every other selling channel, Shopify also has some issues. Today we will talk about Shopify inventory management issues.

Shopify offers more features for dropshippers than manufactures and thus majorly used by reseller or dropshippers. You will get a lot of features related to selling, adding products etc. Still, when you talk about the other features that every small business needs, like vendor management, advance inventory reports, or profit loss graphs, Shopify lacks here, and people start wondering about the other platforms that offer these features.

Raw Material Inventory Management

In Shopify, tracking of product stock and raw material for the production of products is not possible which is required by many small business owners. It only offers the feature for ‘left stock’, but there is no raw material inventory tracking system.

Raw Material Inventory feature is really crucial for businesses as it keeps them one step ahead of any future problem related to production. Through this feature they can know if they are low on raw materials before it is too late. Because Shopify is not providing this feature, you need to track the raw material stock manually.

Reordering

When it comes to tracking, as we told before, Shopify offers you the tracking feature for the remaining quantity for any product, but what they don’t provide is the alerting feature if the product is out of stock. Imagine if you are selling various products on Shopify and one of them is out of stock, but you have no idea about it because you haven’t checked the quantity visually.

Because of this problem, you will never be able to reorder the supplies on time, especially if you haven’t checked every product quantity one by one, which is impossible.

Batch, Serial, and Expiry Tracking

The business owner who runs the medical or electronic business has to take returns sometimes. After getting these returns, they need to maintain the data for these products returning from customers. Now, they are probably operating data manually on sheets for these returns and making the sheets for the batch numbers and expiration dates of every individual product on inventory. But why is this happening? This is happening because Shopify does not provide a tracking facility for this.

After every sale, you must manually mention which product is sold, the expiry date, and other items on the sheets. Because of this complicated manual tracking, you will face many issues; one mistake can turn into an order return, which is not profitable.

Businesses need to track the vendors from batch numbers to know where the product has been purchased, especially for the medical or grocery sellers; the expiration and manufacturing dates are essential.

Reports and Analytics

When it comes to the sales insights of a day, week or month, Shopify will give you valuable insights to know where you are standing, but is that enough for anyone? No, it’s not; every big or small seller needs to ensure that they are getting a good output or profit from the sales; a good business is where you know how much margin you are getting from a particular product.

The price of raw materials frequently changes in the market, and production costs also increase. So, in this case, when the price of a particular product is frequently changing. It is essential to track your profits to know if that profit is enough and cover all your production and other expenses.

5 Benefits of Shopify Inventory Management

Shopify is one of the most renowned eCommerce platforms for new businesses. Irrespective of the size of your business, anyone can make their Shopify store within minutes. Its user-friendly interface is so clean and simple that anyone with low technical knowledge can manage to set up their store on Shopify.

It will, step by step, allow you to set up your store so that nothing remains unset-up; from product listing to inventory tracking and sales flow of individual time, you will get all the necessary features required for any beginner seller. But when it comes to expanding the business to other channels or making the more extensive production, Shopify will lack on specific level tracking of your business.

Now here, you need to manually track all the data, which is essential for profit. So, here comes Zoho inventory which will give you the detailed inventory tracking system so that you don’t need to do manual tracking on sheets.

Here are some benefits that you’ll get when you manage your Shopify inventory properly.

Inventory tracking on individual listings

Shopify inventory management tool lets you set up inventory by the individual listing of every product and organize them by the type and category of the product. This makes it easier to know if any product is low on stock, and finding them will be simple too by entering any category or the product name itself. You need to make sure each of your listings includes inventory files to know the low stock from any inventory field.

Product variations inventory

Different businesses have extensive inventories, and every product has different variants like sizes, colours patterns or production material, etc. But when it comes to inventory management, many of these people forget to mention variants of their products on inventory tracking. Due to this, they did not recognize how much stock was left for a particular product variant.

Shopify Inventory lets you create versions of a single product by the colours and other categories and mention the price and inventory number of every product variant you sell.

Bulk inventory updates

Sometimes the product quantity is higher than usual, so you need to maintain that quantity on the Shopify inventory. For that, you can change the inventory quantity for any product by its category, location or other specific types. Through this setup, when you import inventory quantity changes in bulk, they appear in the same row and columns as the spreadsheets.

Inventory transfers

Track down the inventory transfers from warehouse to supplier locations. Data and insights tell us where we are standing as a business and how much profit we are getting from producing any specific product. On Shopify, when you are fulfilling the product by a third party, then you won’t be able to create transfers in your inventory

Inventory history

One of the best features of Shopify inventory management is that you can easily track the product history by the date or the specific changes made to that entry, who made those changes and quantity. Through this history feature, you can know the product stock history by a particular date.

Features and Aspects to Consider When Choosing an Inventory Management App - Detailed Buying Guide

Every eCommerce seller needs an inventory tracking system that should be perfect in terms of insights, data entry, and counting of the products. If these trackings are not accurate, or there is any mistake related to the product entry and quantity, it can lead to unnecessary purchases, delays in shipment.

These tracking problems happen when you don’t have a reliable inventory tracking system, and you are tracking the data manually. It will drive customer dissatisfaction, which is not suitable for your business.

It does not matter if your business is small or not; any business can automate its inventory management through a reliable app. Inventory automation is always a good option compared to manual, especially when improving your business efficiency. By choosing the automation, the problems like common entry errors do not happen, and you will feel the next level Shopify selling experience.

Now, if you’re looking for some factors for choosing a good inventory management app, then here you go:

The size of your team

Before searching for an ideal inventory management system for your company, it is crucial to understand the size of your team and how many people will actually utilise/access. Because most of the time, people pay for high plans when there are only very few people actually using it or vice versa. So to spend your money efficiently on these plans, you have to figure out the size of your team or manpower.

Many of these management platforms offer monthly fee concepts instead of flat out prices, and variation in users also affects the price. Now here, you need to act wisely to save many and get reliable inventory management software at the same time.

How much inventory are you tracking?

Every organization has a different inventory size that they need to manage using the inventory management tool. Thus it is crucial to see how much inventory size you need to track daily when choosing an inventory management tool. There is no need to pay for a larger pack with many monitoring facilities for multichannel selling, especially when you are selling on a single platform.

If you are selling on a single platform right now, it doesn’t mean that you will never sell on other ones. Every business needs to expand its limits; and thus you need to think about your future plans as well while opting for any plan so you can utilize the extra tracking facilities later when required.

What kind of inventory are you managing?

Not every inventory is the same, there are various types of businesses in the market right now, and they have different kinds of inventory management needs. Shopify provides you a lot of features but still there are many features like specific level tracking that Shopify lacks for many businesses. So depending upon the type of inventory you want to manage, you need to choose the right tool for your organization.

For example: People from a medical or electrical field have to track the products by the batch number or the expiry dates, but Shopify doesn’t offer batch number tracking facilities. So if you have requirements for some specific level inventory tracking, you should look for the options that provide this.

What is your budget?

There are too many options for inventory management in the market right now; it depends on you what your budget is. With a higher price, you will surely get a lot of features with specific level inventory tracking, but that does not mean that lower budget businesses can’t get good inventory management software. Depending upon your budget, you can find the perfect combination of pricing and features for your business. So always compare before purchasing.

Integrations

Integrations of tools are essential because they make your tasks easy and convenient to handle to grow your business online. Integration tools are required for day-to-day tasks. Depending upon their business and customers’ needs, people use many tools, and it will be good if your purchased inventory manager app is compatible with those apps.

Here’s the Best Shopify Inventory Management Apps For Your Business

To grow your online business, you need some extraordinary and easy to use Shopify inventory management apps, like:

SkuVault

SkuVault is a cloud-based stock and warehouse management software tool for small and medium businesses online. It comes with outstanding management features, like:

  1. Fast implementation – Let you sync your products automatically.
  2. Automate inventory with Shopify- No more manual updates are required.
  3. Pull orders from Shopify automatically to make fulfilment faster
  4. Provides real-time data by syncing to Shopify after every five minutes.

Stock Sync

Stock Sync is a popular eCommerce inventory management app that lets you update existing products with over 80 different connection methods. Some of its key highlighted features are:

  1. Sync your offline inventory system
  2. Support multiple formats and sources for seamless operations
  3. Let you set time to get inventory updates
  4. Let you conveniently manage suppliers/dropshipper feed through its help section
  5. Users can remove the product from stores conveniently.

Pros:

  1. Affordable price plans with a flexible pricing structure, so you only pay as per your business needs.
  2. Have all the tools you need for inventory tracking.
  3. Allow setting custom pricing rules.
  4. Allow Workflow Automation by setting ‘triggers’ that launch your desired automation.

Cons:

  1. Doesn’t offer analytics or reporting tools.
  2. Only suitable for inventory management and syncing.
  3. Lacks multiple in-built integrations that connect Stock Sync with other tools.

TradeGecko

Tradegecko develops online inventory and order management tools for SMEs based on their requirements and budget. Some of the key highlighting features you can find in these management tools are:

  1. Automate order routing
  2. Join orders from various sources using multiple inventory and accounting apps
  3. Product tracking is possible across channels, warehouses and fulfillment locations
  4. Let you store data based on purchase histories and customer-specific insights
  5. Provide reports, calculations, and forecasts

Pros:

  1. Provides complete inventory control.
  2. Show inventory statistics in real-time.
  3. Integration with all major sales channels to enhance multichannel sales management.
  4. Suitable for both B2B and wholesale businesses.
  5. Automation and reporting features are available on Trade Gecko’s cheapest plan.

Cons:

  1. The user interface is a little complicated for new customers.
  2. You get a limited number of orders to handle per month in its cheaper or beginner plans.
  3. You require to purchase its small business plan at the very least to integrate with Shopify.

Skubana

Skubana is another order management tool that offers business intelligence, inventory management and order fulfilment features for multi-channel profitability. Some of its key highlighted features are:

  1. Import orders from all channels that you sell products on
  2. Print shipping labels from all main carriers
  3. Route your orders to 3rd-party fulfillment centers automatically
  4. Reveal trends, SKU-level FIFO profitability, and actionable opportunities
  5. View, manage and synchronize multi-channel inventory

Pros:

  1. Convenient platform designed by sellers for sellers
  2. Incredibly intuitive for beginners
  3. Excellent customer service and support
  4. Great analytics features with detailed reports
  5. All-in-one platform for managing business performance
  6. Insights into your most popular products
  7. Single-click warehouse importing

Cons:

  1. A bit pricey
  2. Lots of features mean more of a learning curve
  3. Fewer integrations than some alternatives

Stocky

Stocky is an effective inventory management app on Shopify, designed for POS pro, with some key highlighted features, like:

  1. Demand forecasting
  2. Automatic stock updates
  3. Stock transfers
  4. Performance analysis
  5. Detailed analytics

Pros:

  1. Easy to create orders for suppliers and vendors
  2. Intuitive backend system for beginners
  3. Order suggestions based on sale data
  4. Low stock indicators and insights into high-revenue items
  5. Demand forecasting support
  6. Stock transfers and adjustments
  7. Analytics and insights with in-depth reporting

Cons:

  1. No extra functionality like order and shipping fulfilment
  2. Lack some advanced forecasting tools

Sellbrite

Sellbrite is a multi-channel listing platform for eCommerce stores that let you list and sell products through multiple sales channels for more profitability. Some of its key features are:

  1. Automatic inventory syncing across channels
  2. Fulfillment by Amazon integration
  3. Multiple warehouse location support

Pros:

  1. Free plan is available for trial purposes.
  2. You can access all features (apart from telephonic support) even with the most affordable payment tiers.
  3. Integrates with all significant marketplaces.
  4. The one-click listing feature makes product publishing fast and easy.
  5. Offer shipping label assistance.
  6. Managing multiple warehouses using this app is convenient and simple.
  7. Easy-to-use, centralized management interface

Cons:

  1. No POS integration available.
  2. Features are a little limited compared to their more expensive alternatives.

ShipHero

ShipHero ensures eCommerce fulfilment through end-to-end automation, mobile-powered workforce and one-click Shopify integration. Some of its highlighting features are:

  1. Multi-warehouse inventory management
  2. Excellent packing, picking, and shipping functions
  3. Streamline shipping processes to reduce shipping costs
  4. Real-time tracking for both inventory and orders
  5. Cloud-based functionality
  6. Kit creation and cycle counting
  7. Integrations with USPS, eBay, and Amazon

Pros:

  1. Brilliant multi-warehouse inventory management
  2. Reduce shipping costs
  3. Run a warehouse fearlessly
  4. Real-Time Inventory and orders tracking
  5. Completely cloud-based solution
  6. Integrations with USPS, eBay, and Amazon

Cons:

  1. Very expensive
  2. Complicated for beginners

Fishbowl Inventory

Fishbowl Inventory is a renowned manufacturing and inventory management software that integrates with Quickbooks and Shopify to track your stock, warehouse, sales, etc easily. Some of its highlighted features are:

  1. Integrates with other software, apps, and tools.
  2. Helps with work orders and asset management
  3. Full suite of analytics tools and reports
  4. Real-time inventory updates
  5. Non-expiring subscription

Pros:

  1. One-time software purchase
  2. Easy imports from QuickBooks
  3. Integration and migration support packages
  4. Easy implementation
  5. Separate products for warehousing and manufacturing

Cons:

  1. Limited customization
  2. High up-front cost
  3. Lacklustre shipping features
  4. Unreliable customer support
  5. No FIFO or LIFO support

Veeqo

Veeqo is a one-stop inventory management software that comes with 21+ integrations and fulfilment tools for eCommerce stores. Here are some of its key highlighted features:

  1. Excellent customer service and support
  2. Easy integration with multiple channels
  3. 21 different shipping order integrations
  4. Intuitive interface and easy to navigate backend

Pros:

  1. Let you update stock on the move and scan product barcodes.
  2. Constantly develops new features for sellers.
  3. Let you upload different quantities to different stores.
  4. The app makes it extremely mobile and allows you to check on stock levels and performances while on the move.

Cons:

  1. Customer Support lacks in resolving a few issues.
  2. You have to manually link your products with supplier codes which is a massive problem when you have plenty of SKU’s.
  3. Customer support service takes a lot of time to revert and is not up to the mark.
  4. Order processing is very convenient and simple with no worry and risk of error.

Katana

It is a renowned and easy-to-use manufacturing ERP software that comes with features like:

  1. Ability to streamline inventory tracking for manufacturing
  2. An automatic booking engine
  3. A sales fulfillment syncing portal
  4. Easy to use, intuitive interface

Pros:

  1. Intuitively tracks cost and delivery standards. It connects natively to Shopify to pull orders more efficiently.
  2. The customer support team is great and helps you fix all stock and order management issues.
  3. It’s great to be able to log in on any computer without having to install software.
  4. Keep your inventory tidy and up-to-date.

Cons:

  1. It’s still a relatively young product, and a few features are missing here and there.
  2. A drawback is the inability to track shipping supplies, leaving those to be manually tracked for replenishment.
  3. Relatively Weak inventory management system.

Closing

When looking for the best Shopify Inventory management tool, you must look for a few crucial features and integrations that make order tracking, inventory management and fulfilment process convenient and straightforward for you.

After reading our detailed Zoho inventory reviews and alternatives for Shopify inventory management tools, we hope you will choose the right one for your store based on your requirements, budget and products. If you have any other queries related to eCommerce store management, please share them with us in the comments. For more tips and detailed guides, keep checking our related articles.