I am looking for a solution to manage the stock and make my purchases to suppliers. In fact, it seems it's not possible directly in cs-cart.
There should be a way to manage this with an erp ? Is there one that work well with cs-cart ?
Thanks for your help as cs-cart really seems to be the solution we need in front-end. We just need to find the right way to manage the back-office.
Regards,
There are many people looking for something like this. It's on my roadmap too… just finishing my crm system as we speak and will start after that. Didn't do quite enough research yet but it seems a smart move to connect this to an accounting app too… Xero being my favorite. It also has inventory so I hope that will suffice for us (we don't have that many vendors).
We use Tradepoint360 for these exact functions. It is a full-suite ERP package that also supports e-commerce functionality.
You can set minimum and maximum quantities, perform stock analysis and manage multiple warehouses. It will notify you when stock is low on a product, and you can generate POs to reorder very easily.
It depends what size of company you are, but an ERP system like Tradepoint comes in handy if you're managing a growing business. We've spent a lot of time and $ integrating CS-Cart with Tradepoint 360 but the results are really paying off. Our conversion rates with CS-Cart are phenomenal and Tradepoint has been the perfect back-office to support the inventory, product management and accounting functions.
Hi Jacques,
I did see your other post and it looks awesome what you guys did. I'm afraid we are still way too small though for such a huge solution. We just opened 8 months ago…
For now, i think I figured out a way of using Xero and Capsule CRM with google apps as an inventory / crm accounting system - this would keep our costs low and still offer a lot of functionality.
Or would you advice me to look into a full ERP system like Tradepoint more? (we are located in Europe btw, so i'm also wondering if this would give problems).
@ Pascal, I have also looked into openERP, which offers a free community version.
Thanks - Flo
Hey Flo,
I understand your position and certainly don’t want you to break the bank as a start-up. What I will say is that we started with stuff like BigCommerce and Quickbooks and quickly realized that these solutions were a short-term solution to a long-term problem. You can easily spend tons of money implementing solutions for the time being that you will later outgrow. If you do a total cost of ownership analysis, you may be surprised at how much these ‘quick-fix’ solutions cost compared to doing it right the first time. Unfortunately we’re guilty of doing it wrong the first time 
Lesson learned!
Last time I checked pricing, Tradepoint was offered for $995/user. I don’t think there’s a minimum user commitment, so even if you had just a two or three user environment, I still think it’s a great deal. Consider it a long-term investment, if you will. I am fairly confident that they have support for the EU countries. I would advise you to contact them if you’re seriously interested.
I understand this can be cost-prohibitive for a small business, but let’s consider a few things:
- Compared to a SaaS offering like SalesForce, which can be in excess of $100/user/month, this is a steal.
- From our experience, you buy this software once and then pay a reasonable annual maintenance fee. Again, compared to SalesForce or some other Saas alternative, this is a great deal.
- The functionality in this software far exceeds the cookie-cutter Quickbooks or SMB Sage solutions. It is ahead of its time.
- It supports multi-store, which we’ve already implemented with the alt-team module, and can easily extend to CS-Cart Ultimate.
Again, this is just my two cents, but I can tell you that we’re very happy with the solution we’ve implemented. We see this as a future-proof solution with the scalability and flexibility to grow.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact me. I can also provide contacts from Tradepoint for further info.
Cheers,
Thanks for your reply Jacques! I will contact tradepoint and see if it's something for us.
Flow