Any developers working on shipping physical product?
At DeskBeers (deskbeers.com) we ship quite a lot of beer. It's a PITA keeping track of stock. I was wondering if anyone uses anything they actually like for this?
Currently we're using tradegecko.com, but it's a really fully-featured product and not particularly well suited to our way of doing business. It has some good parts, like creating Purchase Orders to increment stock and Sales Orders to decrement stock, but it also wants to do our billing/invoicing, provides a B2B store and a load of other things that we don't really need.
I feel like there ought to be an "API-first" solution out there that's just really good at keeping track of stock? Does that exist?
I suspect you are the 10th person I've heard complain about a lack of good inventory management software, yet I still don't feel like I understand what you are looking for and why existing products you have tried don't fill that need. As a result, it is very hard for anyone to take a question like yours and actually give you actionable feedback.
For instance, if you explained how you use tradegecko, specific reasons and examples why it doesn't fit your needs, and some specific examples of what you wished it could do then there is a possibility that someone could build something with you in mind, recommend a different piece of software that satisfies your needs, or even recommend a new workflow with existing software that would help remedy your issues.
With what you have provided so far the best I or really anyone else could likely do is recommend other software with no real idea as to whether or not it addresses your needs.
TL;DR - Can you be more specific about why existing software doesn't work so others can actually help. 😀
Hey! Yeah, I don't think I'm the only one that is generally dissatisfied with their stock management tools! Perhaps it's just a hard thing to get right in all circumstances?
I've had a go at providing more info here: https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/any-developers-working-on-shipping-physical-product-fd058993e9?commentId=-LME8OOav9vLS3twMtmB
I'm working on building a custom SaaS style system for my wife's craft business. She keeps tons of stats on everything she makes, sells, deals, discounts, demographics of people sold to, but the majority of her sales are done via in person at craft shows, and I feel like most products really just cater to folks primarily selling online.
My new system, which once it's built I'll open up for other to try, focuses on inventory management and tracking sales with demographics. You can also track materials in stock and in progress items, what stage they are at, and what materials are missing. For us, we have stuff like coasters with different pop culture images on them, different sizes/shapes of heat/cold bags made with different pop culture fabrics, and various crocheted items (pikachu's, pokeballs, bombflowers, goombas, jellyfish, etc.).
I'm also making an interface so you can bring a tablet to a show and be able to quickly look up if you have something in stock (we've got like 60 different coaster pictures, some with multiples), and being able to quickly record a sale with full demographic information including gender, age range, group size and attributes (couple, group of friends, mother/kid, etc.), if its a gift or not, attributes of the recipient if they tell us, other attributes (nerd, gamer, punk, hippie, etc.) and more.
You can template items so it's easy to make new ones with all the right attributes, tags, and status settings as well so you can track the stage of things still in production. I've also added various cost fields to everything so you can help use it in an accounting fashion to understand where all your costs lie and what kind of money you make based on product type to demographic.
Not sure if it would really make as much sense for you in what you sell, it's all about physical stuff and physical sales.
Accurate stock management is a hard problem. There will always shipping and receiving goofs, supplier shortages, shrinkage (especially for a product like beer !), etc. that will cause your inventory to be off and require hand recounts. IMO, if you're in control of your own database, the best solution is to write your own custom solution yourself. That what I ended up doing for our business. Good luck.
Hey, couple good comments here asking for more detail on both the problem and the solution.
Here goes, but first I want to prefix this by saying that I wish I hadn't called out tradegecko by name - I really don't mean to bag on them, and for someone else they might be a great fit. But here's why it's not working for me:
For context, DeskBeers is a Rails app that performs automated fulfilment of orders by following some business logic. Customers order "a box of beer" and the system decides which box of beer to give them based on the customer's stated preferences, the age of the beer in stock (first in, first out), what the customer has had in the past and some other business-logic criteria. This stuff is just that - DeskBeers business logic, and it should remain in the DB app.
So far, so good.
In order to fulfill an order, therefore, we need to know how many of each type of box we have in stock. Boxes are represented in (what I will now refer to as) the stock system as composite variants. A composite variant is a SKU that is composed of other SKU's, e.g. if I have SKUA, SKUB and SKUC I can put one each of them together into SKUD, and if I have >= 1 each of SKUA, SKUB and SKUC in stock, I have >= 1 SKUD in stock.
Fine. I can check how many composite variants I have in stock, pull the details for those SKUs and decide which boxes are available to DB to assign out.
The trouble comes when, after processing a few days worth of orders, the stock system starts showing negative quantities of some composite variants, or is showing as having in stock SKUs that I know we don't have any of.
Additionally, doing procedural stuff like entering stocktake information at the end of the month is a pain, creating new SKU's is a pain (we create a dozen SKUs a week, which isn't a lot but adds up), and answering simple questions like "who received this SKU" is a pain.
Some of these errors are clearly human errors (the order was for X but the person packed Y by mistake), some are - I suspect - timing errors (the Sales Order wasn't marked as "shipped" before another was assigned the same stock - a race-condition, if you will) and some could be managed better by better separation and definition of responsibilities.
However, of all the stock systems I've tried, I've yet to find one that isn't trying to be all things to all people and instead focus on being really good and just keeping those numbers correct.
I guess I'm hoping to find a simple API that I can plug into that allows me to:
Increment stock (raise a purchase order)
Decrement stock (create a sales order)
Give me a list of all items in stock at any given point
Give me the attributes of a given stock item
Maybe provide some basic UI to perform those actions
That's it.
It would also be cool if that system also had some kinda webhooks implementation so I can hook into lifecycle events, e.g. get a notification into Slack when a PO is marked as received by the warehouse.
Basically I want Stripe for stock management.
Does that exist?
Hey @rodreegez !
We at Vuk are currently working on solving this particular problem. It'd be great to get in touch, feel free to shoot me an email :)!
Not that I know of - but shoot me an e-mail and we'll make it happen :)
I launched https://sketchpads.co a couple weeks ago and had a successful launch on Product Hunt. I've been getting 1-2 orders a day since then. I'm a software engineer by trade but this is the first physical product I've launched on my own.
I sell via Shopify so they handle all inventory transactions for me. I can adjust inventory manually if I need to. Could you use Shopify to manage your catalog and pull inventory numbers via their API?
Here are their API docs for the inventory endpoint:
https://help.shopify.com/en/api/reference/inventory
I no longer work in e-commerce for my day job but I spent about 5-6 years at various ecommerce companies. I haven't heard of any inventory management as a service companies myself, but I've been out of the industry for a year or two now.
I've considered building a catalog as a service API, and an inventory management as a service API seems like they would go well together.
I think Shopify is awesome, and I kinda wish we'd spent a bit more time trying to figure out if we could make it do what we need before diving in and building our own Rails app. However, we didn't so we did. I wonder if I could perhaps use Shopify's inventory stuff and leave off the store 🤔
Well, what would be the endpoints that you'd hope existed in such a system? How would you want to tie into it? Maybe I or someone else can whip up something.
I'm working on shipping a product (a custom machine), but my inventory needs for components are still "10 of these, 5 of those".
Hey Russ,
I've tried to give a bit more background and detail the API endpoints I'd like here: https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/any-developers-working-on-shipping-physical-product-fd058993e9?commentId=-LME8OOav9vLS3twMtmB
What are you currently using to manage "10 of these, 5 of these"?