First off, I'm SUPER grateful for the advent of Zoho Inventory and now the Zoho Commerce Suite. Overall, Inventory is a great product, especially for customers without an eCommerce presence.

For eCommerce companies (especially those shipping more than ~10 packages/day), however, there are certain drawbacks that keep my clients from moving over to Zoho Inventory:

1. Invoice + Package Creation from Shopify/Other eCommerce Integrations: Zoho Inventory makes the somewhat perplexing decision to pipe in Shopify orders (which have already been paid for) as un-invoiced Sales Orders. This means that Invoices need to be manually created and marked as "Paid" (with payment recorded), and Packages need to be created from there.

This is annoying for <10 packages a day, but anything more than that and it becomes untenable. Zoho has released a custom function for automatically creating the Invoice and package + shipment, which is much appreciated. However, it should be built into the system itself.

2. You Can't Set Product Weights: Zoho Inventory doesn't have the capability of assigning weights to each variant. When sending a package with multiple items, you have to manually sum the weight of all items in the package.

Again, Zoho has released a custom function to help alleviate this. Still, functionality like this should be built-in to the product.

3. Label Creation Process is SLOOOOOOOOOOOOW. For anyone that's used ShipStation, ShippingEasy, SmartShyp, etc., you're used to highly streamlined label creation that's connected with a label printer. I used to run eCommerce Operations for a company that shipped 1,000+ packages/day — I could print all of my 1,000 labels with two clicks of a button.

Zoho Inventory's label printing process is far too time-intensive. It doesn't sync with any label printers, and labels and packing slips have to be printed one-by-one.

Improvements to the label creation process, unfortunately, don't appear to be in Zoho's roadmap.

Ok, now that the cons are off my chest — why would an eCommerce outfit choose to use Zoho Inventory?

1. The Integration w/Zoho Books. I can't express how nice it is for every shipment to be so perfectly tracked in Zoho Books. You don't have to ditz around with Zapier + QuickBooks + .CSV imports + manual anything, it's just all there, immediately. Very, very handy.

What's been your experience with Zoho Inventory for eCommerce?