Santa Barbara Company review for Thrive by Shopventory

Feb. 9, 2022

I am torn between giving this app 3 and 4 stars. The customer service gets 5 stars. Hyper responsive helpful chat support and great onboarding. This app itself has several limitations that would be deal breakers except I can't find any viable alternative. There are many positives. It looks like the low inventory reports, expiration date tracking, bundling features will work well for us. They want you to create all products in Shopventory, but there doesn't appear to be any consequence for creating them in Shopify and then importing them, which is great. 1) You cannot edit any cost information once inventory is received. This means that we either give up on trying to use Shopventory to track our inventory costs, or we have to wait to receive (and start selling) inventory until these costs can be determined. We typically don't know freight costs at the time the PO is created or the inventory is received. My inventory staff are not my accounting staff, so they don't have access to these numbers. 2) The purchase order list page shows invoice subtotals, which means we can't easily scan this list to match POs to payments on our bank statement and credit card statements, which of course reflect the order total after discounts and freight. I cannot imagine a use case where any customer would prefer to see subtotals. 3) The purchase orders are so unpolished as to be borderline illegible and do not reflect well on our business. I don't need fancy, but these are too rough. Our address is long so it runs right into the adjacent field, as no padding is built in. One of the fields defaults to %null% rather than just 0 or blank. You can't email a PO unless you've created it (which runs into having final cost information I mentioned on #1). Even if we did email it, the email is very unpolished and you cannot set any default email text. I'd love to have a quick default message asking the vendor to confirm receipt and provide us with an estimated delivery date, and provide our contact information on this email. You can provide a custom note, but this note shows up at the bottom of the email as a "user note:" I am not my vendor's "user"! 4) Vendor info from Shopify isn't pulled over, so this makes setup VERY time consuming for us as we have about 100 vendors and well over 1000 products. We're sticking with it because despite these frustrations, our current lack of inventory control is causing even more problems. I know that building an app this robust is daunting, but these aspects feel as though no one has really thought them through.