How is Your eCommerce Experience w/Zoho Inventory?

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:

Cons:

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.

2. The Integration w/the Rest of the Zoho Suite. It's great to be able to connect your entire marketing + sales outfit with your fulfillment and operations.

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

Peter Fuller

Camber Dynamics - Zoho Authorized Partner

www.camberdynamics.com

sales [at] camberdynamics.com

Zoho Desk Resources

Desk Community Learning Series
Digest
Functions
Meetups
Kbase
Resources
Glossary
Desk Marketplace
MVP Corner
Word of the Day

Sticky Posts
Zoho Inventory will discontinue support for older browser versions soon
Hello users, Starting from May 15, 2024, Zoho Inventory will no longer support the following browser versions: Browsers Version Restrictions Firefox Browser Versions older than 100 Google Chrome Versions older than 100 Microsoft Edge Versions older than
Zoho Finance Workshop 2023 is coming to the USA. Meet the experts, get exclusive training on Zoho Finance apps and more.
Hello all, We'd like to invite you to our biggest Zoho Finance workshop in the United States. After a brief break, we are excited to be back. This year, we're bringing together our customers and community members for two days of curated hands-on sessions,
Celebrating our Zoho Community SuperBuds
The SuperBud program recognizes the efforts Zoho users put in to help the rest of the community thrive and grow in their individual Zoho journeys. Be it the ZUG meetups or these forums, several Zoho users including our MVPs andZUG leaders, have stepped
Authtoken Deprecation for Zoho Inventory APIs
UPDATE (7 July 2021): We've extended the deadline to 30 August 2021 for converting Authtokens to OAuth. Hello everyone, The usage of Authtokens to authenticate API calls is being deprecated on 30 August 2021 across Zoho's Finance suite of products,
ZOHO Inventory - Early Access
https://twitter.com/zoho/status/646715717849493504