Inventory Planner by Sage

Held hostage on a 12 month contract with Brightpearl on this Inventory Planner app, was paying about $300/month and they jacked it up over $600/month and required us to sign a 12 month contract. All this during our busiest time of year here in Q4, and threatened to shut down our account if we didn't renew even with asking to push the renewal to January 2023. Software isn't bad, but the service and sales tactics are the worst I have ever expierenced with a software company. Be warned and Brightpearl/Sage, really disappointed in the way you treated us on this and gave us no other option. -Ian, Co-Founder & CEO

To Further my response in response to your response Tom, you are actually making it worse by responding the way you have. There was no "free access through December" we have still been paying monthly at our more reasonable rate of $300/month, and you told us about our price increase right at the Q4 window, and still to this date havent given us a great answer into your complicated formula as to how you increased our price the way you did. We were told if we didn't sign a new contract in December that you would revoke our access to the software, so please don't try to and manipulate the way this all happened. Hand's down one of the worst experiences we have had with software, and your response is making it worse. My recommendation, just be honest and authentic with something like, "Sage bought BrightPearl, BrightPearl bought IP, and someone made a poor business decision to hold businesses hostage in their busiest time of year since they would have no other option, happy holidays"

We have been using inventory planner for about 6 months now and I don't see how we can function without. There's a lot of functionality to this program and yes it will take a minute to get a good grasp on it but once you do, you'll be glad you are using it. There is good support documentation with videos and tech support has been great. The onboarding team is great as well. They know the software inside and out. It's extremely powerful. Inventory forecasting and planning is complicated in general so you need a software program that can handle it, and this one does the trick. It's not cheap, we spend $20K a year but it's worth it. Look at it as hiring a data analytics person on the team for 20K. Not only that, it will help you manage your inventory purchases, so you're not over or under ordering stock.

We have 13 retail locations and we use it extensively for generating stock transfers to our stores from our warehouse. No more guessing on how much inventory to send to a store. There is also a nice feature that will automatically generate stock transfers and purchases orders on a schedule you configure. I have it set to place them in draft mode and run weekly. Then I can approve or make edits to them before sending it to the warehouse to fill. This has saved us countless hours.

The support has been great too. There has been several times I need a certain functionality and they were able to accommodate it, not in every case but 90% of the time.

Just like any software, it's not 100% when forecasting, sometimes you need to use your judgement. The more data it collects over time, the smarter it gets.

The software is not for everyone but if you have multiple retail locations / warehouses or just need a better way to manage your inventory purchases so you aren't over stocking, then I would recommend checking this one out. It's a great way to help streamline your operations.

If they had inventory management or WMS tied into this, this would make it even more powerful.

If there's any doubt in your mind whether this is the right solution for you, just go ahead and run the trial and your doubts will surely be alleviated. This is an incredibly well-designed piece of software (and I say that as a seasoned software developer myself). As well as its core features being extremely slick, each time I use it, I find more and more handy little power-user features that I didn't spot previously. We've gone from manually searching our inventory for stock to order (and making assumptions about what sells well), writing this all down into an email whilst also cross-referencing vendor references from price lists, sending 'PO' emails and remembering to check back each day for updates and then finally receiving the order and painstakingly updating inventory quantities into Shopify. We now just navigate to Inventory Planner, click the Replenishment tab, select the products that are forecast to go out of stock and hit 'Create PO'. We then email this to the vendor using the handy Email function and all the vendor references that we've previously entered and automatically added to each line item in the PO. Once the stock arrives, we check the stock received against the system and then hit 'Receive All', which in turn then automatically updates Shopify with all the incoming stock amounts. That's it. The whole process has gone from an entire evening of creating a PO and then another entire evening of updating stock, to a process that takes us no more than 10 minutes for each part. I can't even begin to explain how much stress this has alleviated from what was previously a very laborious task (and sometimes error-prone!) Even with its base functionality, it's invaluable, but for e.g, we found the other day that we could also automatically print barcodes for all the received stock. This is a process that would have taken us at least 1-2 hours as our previous system involved exporting product data, making data changes in Excel and then finally uploading to a specialist barcode printing app to make the final prints (which was laborious even in itself). Now, all we do is receive the items into stock and then hit 'Print Labels', which in turn prints a single label for every item we've just received. Better yet, we've been able to convert our existing label design onto Inventory Planner easily as it allows for infinite customizability due to the ability to use custom HTML/CSS (if desired). Support has been amazing. There's been a few occasions where we felt that perhaps something could be done slightly better, or a tweak made to improve the user experience and they've handled these requests perfectly, each time taking the feedback on board and in all situations have returned to me with a workable solution in record time. I've honestly been very impressed at how much they actually care about the customer experience and their ability to implement improvements so quickly. I could go on for far too long about how much time and stress this software has saved us. Needless to say, we're a customer for life!

Hands down Best App we have ever purchased from the app store!!! Elena is so helpful, anytime we need a new feature she has her team add it within 24 hours. Thank you

Amazing inventory management app. Easily can combine demand from different sources by just connecting the accounts and data just flows. Great reports and planning tools!

I use to this app to forecast purchasing trends on our products. Its very helpful. And the customer service team is always very kind and helpful too. Thank you, Jill, for all your expertise! =)

Amazing application that has saved me countless hours managing stock. The sales forecasting has also been incredibly useful as it's helped the business stay in stock, free up cash and increase revenue. The amazing level of detail in the reporting is a huge bonus as well. By far the most useful shopify app I've ever installed.

We've been using Inventory Planner for over 6 months now and it has been an amazing asset for us. It's saved us a lot of time in doing the forecasting for us and has helped us make much better, faster inventory decisions. I've reached out several times for help, and they've always been extremely responsive and super helpful. Tons of features to use, but you can really utilize as much or as little as you want to make it helpful for your needs. Highly recommend!

Inventory Planner has been one of the best apps to ever happen to our store on Shopify. It provides replenishment recommendations/forecasting for your products based on past sales. After the initial setup, thinking about "is this going to be enough inventory to last us the rest of the month" is no longer an issue. Using data-driven recommendations, IP can tell you how much you need of a product and when you need to replenish that specific product so you don't run out. This is especially important if you are placing a purchase order for a product, and need to place another purchase order for the same product before the first purchase order even arrives. The number of different settings they have is far advanced for ANY Shopify app you will find in terms of inventory management. This being said, Inventory Planner is not an IMS system by itself. You can use Shopify has your single source of truth for inventory, or other applications. However, when you allow Inventory Planner to manage the data from your IMS system, your life will change. It does all of the thinking for you. The main things you need to feed it, besides current stock and sales data, are how long the lead time is for certain products and how many days of stock you want to have on hand for a certain product. After that, VIOLA, no more stockouts! Another feature of inventory planner that our store loves is the ability to set up assemblies. If you have certain parts that are in multiple different products that you sell, Inventory Planner can track that part and tell you how much you need to order based on all of the higher-level assembly products that part is in. Jill, Stuart, Bassel, Oleg, and the rest of their team do a phenomenal job both in customer service and in application value (something that is rare to find)! When is the last time you got to chat/email/video call a customer service representative who actually wrote the detailed knowledge base article you had a question about. Not to mention the fact that they are responding to you sometimes in less than an hour! With all of this being said, if you are having inventory management problems, I highly recommend this application! You will be far impressed from your original expectations.

This is the best app for inventory forecasting I found on Shopify by far (I tested them all), but unfortunately it's extremely expensive to use. And in recent, it became so expensive that it put the app out of the question for us. I hope in the future you can drop your prices by increasing the app users and maybe charge for any extra support?