Luke W.
Posted
Woefully inadequate. TG to CIN7 review
We have been with CIN7 since Trade Gecko announced its UK closure. We felt it would be a good fit for our ecom business and would do similar functionality to Trade Gecko. I was promised a custom built system with all the bells and whistles, but I’m afraid it’s pretty much an out of the box system for all. I asked for a few things to be tweaked and they said it would cost a fortune to change. I hope you find this review honest and helpful. We are a small Ecom business that does Amazon, EBay, Shopify as well as wholesaling. If I could have my time again, I would pick a different system, however, we are now deeply ingrained into the system and have mitigated its bugs and faults to the best of our ability. They often promise things will be fixed and they are working on things, but I’m still to see anything but I’m hopeful it will eventually change. I was excited by the many integrations in the system and it was way more than Trade Gecko. However, lots of them have bugs and just don’t run smoothly like they did with TG. Take the Amazon seller integration for example, it oversells our products, which should not happen. We end up unfortunately letting those customers down. It’s not as straight forward as Trade Gecko, and there’s lots of manually pushing data to Amazon. In the early days, I did accidentally add a few thousands SKUs from Amazon I didn’t want. I asked if my 1 click action could be reversed, to a response of no, you have to manually delete those products (which you cannot do in bulk). I even provided a spreadsheet of items to delete, but the answer was to spend hours manually deleting one by one. We wanted to use the shipstation integration, but the way CIN7 have built the integration is poor, so we don’t use it. You cannot change the weight of a product your sending, it only takes the weight you have hard coded into the inventory system. CIN7 doesn’t forward tracking information onto Amazon, so Amazon orders processed on shipstation we’re needing to be manually updated. Two of our biggest apps and processes, with some major limitations. I did read that the customer service was poor. I was hoping that my service would be different, but it was nowhere near where it should have been. My onboarding manager failed to grasp most of my issues, and would often just laugh at the issues on the phone calls. One of my staff sat in on a call, and said “does he always laugh and dismiss our issues like that”. I explained to our onboarder that we cannot print pick lists, and he responded that CIN7 was trying to move its customers away from paper printing. I doubt this was the truth, and one of the many bodged issue resolutions. He was often very defensive in our calls and his common solutions were “that’s a special request feature, and you have to pay per hour for that” or “you don’t understand the system”. He once did a stock adjustment of 100 copies of each of our 5000 SKUs. We notified him and he corrected his mistake, but because he did this, we not cannot delete anything “because there’s a transaction linked to it”. In Trade Gecko, we were just able to print consolidated pick lists of orders. However in CIN7 it now takes my staff an hour a day to manually assign stock to a location so we can print pick lists. A solution of using WMS was touted as a fix, but the whole thing is glitchy and gives us bin locations in crazy’s pick routes. It’s been flagged, and never resolved. To add all our inventory into the system with locations, our on-boarder had to exploit a glitch in the system to get it in. We manually did an adjustment in, voided it and re-instated it to get the bin locations to show. I’ve asked recently if this is still the case and he said it was. It just blows my mind that they would have so many other businesses in the same boat as me, and this crazy method of exploiting glitches is only was to get inventory adjustments done. After all this, I still have no idea how to stock-take successfully. Once your running the system, they quickly off-board you. My onboarding ran over significantly because of all the issues we had, to my handlers defence, he did stick with us as long as he could. They have never checked to see how their system is running with my business and most of my final issues have just been left unresolved. It’s not all doom and gloom. The system has a significant amount of more functionality than Trade Gecko and for lots of processes it’s quicker, easier and more efficient. I keep putting my poor experience down to them onboarding to many other businesses at the same time, but I’m not sure if this is the case. Despite all my issues, we’ve found work arounds or we have been able to live with the mistakes. I still pull my hair out daily with its inadequacies, but it’s something I have no choice with but to live with them.