Stitch Labs Review
-
Expert Analyst & Reviewer
- 45 comments
- Updated on:
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Stitch Labs
| Total Rating | 4.0 |
|---|---|
| Pricing | Poor |
| Hardware & Software Requirements | Fair |
| Ease Of Use | Excellent |
| Features | Good |
| Customer Service & Support | Fair |
| User Reviews | Good |
| Integrations | Excellent |
| Security | Good |
Pros
- Easy to use
- Lots of integrations
- Cloud-based
- Good reporting tools
Cons
- No free trial
- Expensive
- Not suitable for small businesses
Stitch Labs Overview
Since its launch in 2011, Stitch Labs has become one of the most recognized brands in online inventory management. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company processes over $100 million in orders per month through its flagship product, Stitch.
Stitch is a cloud-based SaaS (Software as a Service) application designed to marry inventory, billing, accounting, shipping, and eCommerce together through its myriad features and third-party integrations. One would guess that’s why CEO Brandon Levy and his team decided on the name: they want Stitch to be the thread that holds the back end of your company together.
Stitch is an easy-to-use program that comes packed with features to fit the needs of small to medium-sized businesses. The software is a bit on the spendy side, and you have to pay extra for customer support as well. However, despite these downsides, Stitch could still be a good option worth considering.
Note: In discussions about this product, you’ll often see “Stitch” and “Stitch Labs” used interchangeably. For the sake of clarity, I’d like to point out that Stitch is the name of the application, and Stitch Labs is the company that develops and supports it. Make sense? Great, let’s take a look at Stitch Labs pricing.
Table of Contents
Pricing
Since our last review, Stitch has significantly increased its pricing. This, paired with a lack of transparency, gives it a poor rating in our book and may rule this software out for smaller businesses. Check out our other inventory reviews for more affordable options.
There are several different plans to choose from; pricing can vary at each tier, depending on the number of orders you process per month. Unfortunately, Stitch only publicly provides pricing for its two lowest tiers and even then only for volume orders up to 2,000. If you anticipate having more than that, you’ll need to contact Stitch for a price quote. If you exceed your order limit per month, you’ll be invoiced fees at a 25% premium of the per-order rate. Stitch Labs no longer offers a free trial, but you can request a demo.
Here’s a breakdown of the different tiers:
Basic
- $799/month for up to 2,000 orders/month
- Unlimited sales channels
- Unlimited users
High-Growth
- $959/month for up to 2,000 orders/month
- Virtual bundles and multipacks
- Selective stock push
- 3PL ship notice and receipt integration
- Warehouse management system integrations
- Automated bundle splitting
- Overflow routing
- Proprietary 3PL integrations
- EDI integrations
- Channel connect*
Premium
- Contact a rep for pricing
- Advanced purchase orders
- FIFO costing method
- Landed costs
- Adjustable costs and shipping methods
- Automated pre-order/backorder management
- Sync frequency booster
- Automated order splitting
- Automated order/fulfillment routing
- API access
- Priority access to new features and betas
*Channel Connect allows two-way integration between Stitch and an SFTP server, which in turn can connect to sales channels that don’t natively integrate with Stitch.
Cloud-Based Or Locally-Installed
Stitch is cloud-based only, which means there’s nothing to download or install on your computer.
Hardware & Software Requirements
Stitch Labs recommends using Chrome to access its SaaS, but it also works with Firefox and Safari. Internet Explorer and mobile browsers are not supported.
Specific Size Of Business
Stitch is scalable, which, in theory, makes it usable by businesses of all different sizes. The starting price of $799/month, however, probably makes it a suboptimal choice for businesses that are just starting and aren’t managing a large inventory.
Ease Of Use
Stitch is pretty easy to use, even for the uninitiated. The interface is clean, understated, and intuitive. Within a few minutes of signing up, I’d created several products, several customer contacts, and was generating sales orders with ease. For those who appreciate a little guidance, you’ll find tutorials on each page that go step-by-step through all the basic tasks.
The interface also features pop-up menus for both support and the knowledgebase in the bottom right-hand corner. These did come in handy during the few times in my trial that I needed assistance. After typing my question into the help prompt, I got the information I needed right away.
Setting up integrations is also painless. Linking your different sales channels and add-ons to your Stitch account only takes a few moments. All you need to do is provide details for your third-party account, and the application handles the rest.
Features
Let’s take a look at the main functions of this application:
- Dashboard: Stitch’s dashboard is clean, relatively simple, and to the point. You have eight tabs to navigate through at the top (one of which returns you to the dashboard). In addition to notifications and profile, you have a colorful snapshot of your activity, including inventory, sales orders, and low stock warnings.
Source: Stitchlabs.com
- Inventory: Stitch makes it easy to build product lines and variants quickly. You can upload photos and other files for each product family and variant. The tags you can attach to each item make searching through your inventory way more efficient. Stitch also allows you to differentiate between a variety of standard and custom pricing tiers (retail, wholesale, distribution, etc.) for a product. That comes in handy if you want different prices for different sales channels.
- Warehouse Management: By default, Stitch will assume you have a single warehouse. From the pulldown menu under your user account, you access the Stitch settings and enable multi-warehousing. You can add and edit warehouse details through the locations link under Company Info & Locations. After that, additional warehouse options should become available in your other channels.
- Barcode Scanning: Stitch supports barcode scanning through the Inventory tab.
- Order Management & Fulfillment: You can use integrations (see below) to pull sales information into Stitch or create manual orders. When you’ve closed the order, the stock level will decrease. A colorful “progress summary” column highlights processes in various stages of completion, such as billing, payment, packing, and shipping. You can directly interact with any of the columns or select focused views from the sidebar. If you’re using Stitch, there’s a good chance you’ve got multiple users on your account, so you can set permissions to determine who has access to what part of the workflow.
Source: Stitchlabs.com
- Payments: Payments can be made in-app with the appropriate integrations.
- Contact & Vendor Management: This feature helps you manage customers, suppliers, or anyone else you work with. Plus, you can associate orders, expenses, and other relevant information with them. You can also attach files, such as purchase orders and resale licenses, to each contact for future reference.
- Sales Orders: Stitch allows for the creation of branded invoices, which you can edit and customize in-application.
- Purchase Orders: From the Purchase Order tab, you can see which purchase orders are currently open. To create one, you enter your supplier, your expected buy date, your shipping method, and your payment terms. Stitch offers a few shortcuts; for example, it allows you to replenish all the low stock items from a particular supplier. You can adjust the number of your items or use a default order that you set in advance. When it’s complete, you can email it to your supplier as a PDF, download it for printing, or another method of your choice. When you receive your items, you can review your purchase order against what you received from your supplier and make any necessary adjustments. This helps to create a supplier scorecard that you can use to keep track of your suppliers’ quality and compare them to industry standards.
Source: Stitchlabs.com
- Packing Slips: You can create branded packing slips through the Orders tab.
- Returns: Process returns via the appropriate payment channel integrations. You can then manage your inventory accordingly.
- Reports: Stitch can consolidate data from all elements of your business to create reports and analytics on demand. In addition to the aforementioned supplier scorecard, you can review sales stats for each contact, by type, or by tag. There are around 40 reporting options in total. Of particular note is the “product drill-down,” which helps you hone in on your top-selling products and find out which variants of a particular product are selling the best.
Source: Stitchlabs.com
Customer Service & Support
Many users have complained about Stitch Labs’ relatively slow response time, and they don’t seem too far off. Don’t expect your tickets to get serviced immediately. That said, they will get back to you the same day in the majority of cases, and many users note how friendly and helpful the Stitch Labs support staff are. Stitch Labs has tiered customer service options ranging from Silver to Platinum that determine which modes of contact are available to you and at what hours. Stitch Labs does not divulge the pricing for these plans upfront.
Support services include:
- Phone: Available for all plans 7 AM to 5 PM PT, with extended hours for Gold and Platinum.
- Email: Monitored from 7 AM to 5 PM PT, with extended coverage for Gold and Platinum.
- Support Form: Available through the site.
- Live Chat: Available for all plans 7 AM to 5 PM PT, with extended hours for Gold and Platinum.
- In-Software Help: Stitch provides some limited hand-holding when you start.
- Help Center: Stitch’s online help center provides FAQs, How-Tos, Integration help, and detailed overviews of features.
- Videos: Tutorial and overview videos are scattered throughout the site and on YouTube.
- Webinars: Stitch Labs offers webinars, some of which are recorded and uploaded.
- Account Managers: At Gold and Platinum levels, Stitch will assign you a “success manager” who will be a point of contact between you and the company.
- Audits: At Gold and Platinum level, you are entitled to several account reviews and audits per year. Platinum offers twice as many as Gold.
- Social Media: You can contact Stitch Labs through its Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts.
User Reviews
Negative Reviews & Complaints
Stitch has been around several years, so as you’d expect, there are some bad reviews. The most common complaints I’ve seen are as follows:
- Poor Functionality Outside The US: If you are not an American company, I would strongly recommend reading this article from Stitch’s support base. Numerous users have complained about how Stitch performs outside the US with its lack of currency conversion and no native support for inclusive taxation.
- Integration Dependency: If you want to get the most out of Stitch, you’ll need to use a lot of integrations. Some users felt the process of finding and adding integrations to be time-consuming and difficult.
- Refunds From Sales Channels Not Posting To Stitch: Stitch does not automatically adjust for refunds made through sales channels. This requires the user to manually update both inventory and accounting records, which is cumbersome at best and leaves a lot of room for errors to be made.
- System Speed: Even a few of the favorable reviews I’ve found admit that the software runs slow on occasion.
Positive Reviews & Testimonials
Despite the complaints, most customer reviews of Stitch are generally positive. The company also maintains a positive reputation overall, with an A+ rating from the BBB and 4.5/5 stars on Capterra (based on over 180 ratings). Here are the recurring themes:
- Easy To Use: Though not a universal sentiment, users have praised the software for being easy to learn, easy to use, and easy to integrate with their existing sales channels and shipping solutions.
- Great Customer Support: The consensus is that Stitch’s support staff is friendly and helpful.
- Multiple Integrations: Numerous customers have expressed their appreciation for the variety of available integrations.
- Good Features: I’ve seen numerous posts lauding the invoicing system, the contact management features, and the very robust reporting tools.
Testimonials can be found on the company’s press page.
Integrations
As we touched on earlier, Stitch is very integration-dependent. The good news is there are a lot of integrations to choose from, over 100 to be exact, and Stitch makes it easy to parse through them. API is available for users at the Premium level.
You can import orders from sites such as Shopify and Amazon. When an item sells on any of your sales channels, your inventory automatically adjusts in Stitch. You can also create invoices, handle payments, and generate packing slips right from the Order page. Additionally, integration with add-ons, such as PayPal, Authorize.net, ShipStation, and QuickBooks, make payments, shipping, and accounting much easier.
Source: Stitchlabs.com
Security
Stitch uses 256-bit SSL-encryption to protect your data. Stitch backs up its database twice a day and employs redundant servers and off-site data backups to avoid data loss.
Final Verdict
Stitch is a very slick, very functional piece of software that comes packed with great features. Simply put, it’s easy to use. That’s the biggest selling point for me. Combine that with a powerful suite of tools, and you’ve got a great choice for small to medium-sized businesses. A point of concern, however, is that the software has rapidly grown more expensive over the last few years. At the same time, Stitch Labs has removed its free trial, making it a riskier prospect for interested businesses. You can still request a demo, but it’s not the same as immersing yourself in the software.
Still, Stitch remains a good solution for mid-sized businesses. Give it a try or take a look at our other top inventory software options to find the perfect choice for your business.
Chris Motola
Expert Analyst & Reviewer at Merchant Maverick
An expert in personal and business loans and financial health, Chris Motola has been writing about small business finance and payments for over 5 years. He has been cited in various industry publications, including Forbes Advisor, GoBankingRates, and Medium. Chris is a graduate of the University of Central Florida.
View Chris Motola's professional experience on LinkedIn.
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Organization Name: Votive Limited
We started with Stichlabs a few years ago when they were $70 a month. Then the price went to $249 for a couple of years and now they have gone to $799. The product worked well but we were only ever using a fraction of the features, it was clearly time to move.As a parting gift; during our final three months with Stitch (in the midst of COVID-19 and a complete lockdown of our business for 5 weeks) they went ahead and charged us the full $799 for their new “Stitch X” product despite us not even having it. We were still on the same old “classic” product. Says a lot about their company ethics I guess. Stitch is a flashy product with lots of bells and whistles and a hefty price tag…..if you are in need of multi-channel inventory management that can handle kits and bundles for your eCommerce stores and give you the reporting you need, shop around because there are a host of options out there that are much more affordable.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: Serenity Venture Group
We used Stitch for several years. We used to pay $249 a month for it. While not cheap it was acceptable as it offered several features we did not get from just using Square.This year they raised our price to $1290 a month. This was completely unacceptable and I cannot for the life of me see what big changes they made to justify this increase. They obviously decided that small and even mid sized business was not their market anymore.They customer support at Stitch also deserves a much lower rating. You can not call. You have to email and then you will get a response anywhere from several hours to 24 hours. Now imagine having to explain a situation and going back and forth. Issues can take a week to figure out.It is a decent system but there a MANY more options out there much less expensive that will do the exact same thing.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I got two calls into their sales department before finding out that setting up Stitch takes 6-8 weeks.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Pricing changed to annual only. $6000 per year for something that costs half at the competition.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I’d like to point out that ALL, as in EVERY SINGLE 5 star review on the first page and I suspect all the others are from responses from representatives from Stitch. You guys have a serious issue with the way your commenting system works in that it allows these reps to give star reviews that skew the results. There is no way this crumby service deserves a 4 star rating.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Jeff,
You have a point! We are working on putting a stop to this and we really appreciate your feedback. Thanks!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
If you are looking for a software that will seamlessly download your sales from Shopify to Quickbooks, there are some good, cheap apps out there, including SoftCookies, Shopify Integrator. Unfortunately, Stitchlabs is not one of them. StitchLabs DOES NOT INTEGRATE WITH QUICKBOOKS. It does not identify already existing inventory items and instead creates its own names and identifiers. When integrated into Quickbooks, the original QBs inventory is not reduced when a Shopify sale is made. Instead the inventory remains and a new item is created and sold. Leaving the old inventory, a new negative inventory and twice the items. It is a disaster if you have a significant number of product skus (we have over 1,000). The only way to correct is to manually change every single item by hand. Stitchlabs support will only explain that they built the integration quite a while ago and that’s how it is. Not much help.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Please do not trust all of these fake 5-star reviews! My company has to use Stitch because it’s the only inventory management platform that supports multiple Square channels and Woocommerce at the same time. If there was any other platform that could do this we would dump Stitch in a heartbeat. To say that platform is a beta would be too flattering. Basic features like accepting a purchase order or closing transfers are FREQUENTLY broken. Often times inventory numbers will be misreported on in variants so our inventory is off but we have to spend precious work time trying to figure out where the error is just to find out it’s a Stitch problem Despite paying several hundred dollars a month for the service, they sent us an email a couple of weeks ago saying that our service plan would not allow us access to chat or phone support. Their “Phone Support” was a joke anyways because you have to submit a ticket then they would call you. Rarely did we ever get a call back. Now we can only look at their FAQs or email them for problems. If you’re thinking about using Stitch, get used to someone telling you “We’ll forward this problem to our engineers.” This seems to be the generic response to every single thing that goes wrong they can’t fix. Our company has lost at least HUNDREDS OF HOURS of work time because of Stitch problems since we started using Stich almost 2 years ago(I swear this is not an exaggeration). If you don’t need support for multiple Square channels and Woocommerce, use ANY OTHER SERVICE. Stitch is the worst.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Does a decent job syncing inventory between multiple channels, creating purchase orders, and receiving inventory, but does a TERRIBLE job syncing with QuickBooks online. Our books are a DISASTER because of the bugs in Stitch, not syncing accurate inventory values or being able to calculate COGS. Using Stitch cost me thousands of dollars having to hire an accountant to audit our books and try to make sense of the non-sensical data imported from Stitch.To add insult to injury, after signing up and paying extra for the plan that included “phone support” (which means sending an email and requesting that someone call you back, which could take days, if at all), I got an email saying that Stitch was eliminating phone support, and that support from now on would only be available via email. Was there a reduction in my monthly fee after removing phone support? Har-dee-har-har!!!Needless to say, we are now shopping for different inventory management software. If you are counting on inventory management software to connect with your accounting program and give you accurate numbers, run away from Stitch! If you don’t care about accurate books, then Stitch is quite an adequate program.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hello Sarah:
Thank you posting this review. My company is facing all of the same problems yours is with our Xero integration. I have to do the books an inventory and both are off every week due to problems with Stitch Labs (not that they admit to it). We are also missing 3-4 invoices a week that do not come over to Xero which is extremely frustrating. We are also finding that the COGS data in Stitch Labs is routinely wrong even after updating both manually and via csv.
We are looking for alternatives and wondered what your findings have been? We’re looking for a different platform.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi !
You said the following comment:
“There is one caveat: I cannot recommend this software to companies based outside of the US. If you’re located overseas, I would check out TradeGecko, which is geared more towards international business.”
Does this applies for Canadian business as well ? I’m in Canada and wondering if TradeGecko would be best for us !
Thanks,
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Guillaume,
Yes, I would recommend TradeGecko for you. If you have further questions please let me know.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi everyone,We are based in the UK and have been using SL for over a year now. SL is a major improvement to what we were using before (basically nothing else than spreadsheets) and we like the simple UI.Having said that, we would like to find a better alternative, if it exists, because there are some features we don’t like. To mention some of them:-) probably the major drawback for us is the constant slowness in the response time; for instance when you update a variant and click “save” it can take up to 5 or 7 seconds to complete the update-) you cannot search in your contacts by cities or countries which should honestly be a pretty basic function and a useful one when you are meeting a new client and try to find out if you are already selling in that particular area; so we have to basically create a TAG for each of our contacts so we can retrieve easily clients based in a certain city or a certain country-) when you review the recent orders of a particular client, the “balance due” information on previous orders is not updated so you cannot see whether this client owes you money or not; you can see in other parts of the software for unpaid orders/invoices but if you want to check per client it is not working; this is a BUG which has never been fixed even after repeated emails to support desk for over a year-) the packing slip function is very basic and does NOT allow to have more than 1 product in 1 box so the number of boxes will always be equal to the number of products regardless of the packing, it does NOT add up weight of products nor total size which would be very convenient when booking the transportation (we ship a lot across Europe)-) no mobile app-) no option to add a pic thumbnail next to the products on orders or invoicesOn this last point I would very much like to find an alternative to SL that offers such a feature, as we are in the design field and being able to show a thumbnail pic of our products would be a great addition.Any ideas would be welcome.Best regards.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Very responsive customer service and support — any customer support issues are forwarded to the appropriate party and taken care of right away, which I believe is the sign of a great company.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.