TradeGecko Review

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Date Established

2012

Location

Singapore

Overview:

TradeGecko is a cloud-based inventory SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) application for small to medium-sized businesses. One of the more prominent names in this particular market, the makers of the solution have placed an emphasis on international business. As a result, you’ll see companies all over the world using this product, from Australia to America, to Hong Kong, to Britain.

Though TradeGecko is headquartered in Singapore, its story begins in New Zealand. In 2011, Carl Thompson was running a clothing label out of Aukland. Frustrated by the inefficiency of spreadsheets and manual data entry, he decided to close down his clothing brand and develop a more elegant tool for backend administration. Thompson partnered with brothers Cameron and Bradley Priest, fellow Kiwis and entrepreneurs, and moved to Singapore to secure startup funding for what would become TradeGecko.

Today the company has over 60 employees (split between the Singapore headquarters and another location in Manila). They’ve done over $1 billion USD in transactions through their platform, with customers in 100 countries.

If your interest is piqued, then stick around. We’re about to go deeper into what this platform has to offer.

Pricing:

TradeGecko offers a free 14-day trial, no credit card required. You get a monthly discount if you commit to paying for a year upfront. If you decide to cancel before the year is up, you receive a prorated refund. Here are the plans (prices are in USD):

• Basic:
  • $99/month billed monthly ($79/month annually)
  • Email Support
  • Unlimited Orders/Month
  • 2 Users
  • 1 Sales Channel
  • 1 Warehouse
  • Accounting Integration
  • Unlimited Currencies
  • iPhone/iPad App (for $100/month)

• Business:
  • $249/month billed monthly ($199/month annually)
  • Email Support
  • Unlimited Orders
  • 4 users
  • 2 Sales Channels
  • Multiple Warehouses
  • Unlimited Currencies
  • Accounting Integration
  • B2B e-Commerce Portal
  • iPhone/iPad App (for $100/month)
  • Basic User Rights Management
• Business Premium:
  • $449/month billed monthly ($359/month annually)
  • Email Support
  • Unlimited Orders
  • 8 users
  • 3 Sales Channels
  • Multiple Warehouses
  • Unlimited Currencies
  • Accounting Integration
  • B2B e-Commerce Portal
  • iPhone/iPad App Included
  • Advanced User Rights Management
  • API Access
  • Advanced Warehousing
• Enterprise:
  • $999/month billed monthly ($799 annually)
  • 24/7 Phone Support
  • Unlimited Orders
  • 20 users
  • Unlimited Sales Channels
  • Multiple Warehouses
  • Unlimited Currencies
  • Accounting Integration
  • B2B e-Commerce Portal
  • iPhone/iPad App Included
  • Advanced User Rights Management
  • API Access
  • Advanced Warehousing
  • Multiple Brands

Web-Based or Locally Installed:

TradeGecko is a web-based system. There is nothing to download or install on your computer.

 Ease of Use:

The user interface (UI) for TradeGecko is divided into six main panels:

• Dashboard: This gives an overview of your account, with a chart that shows sales numbers over the last month or so. The dashboard will also walk you through account setup, and notify you if there are any parts of your account that need attention.
• Inventory: A portal for managing products. There are functions for importing your stock info (via spreadsheet), exporting your stock info (also via spreadsheet), creating new products, and editing existing ones. There is also a section for creating product variants.
• Relationships: This manages contact information for all of your customers and suppliers. Like the inventory section, you can import and export data via spreadsheet.
• Sales Orders: A tool for managing sales orders, invoices, shipments, and returns. Orders can be created in a few clicks or saved as sales quotes. There are also portals for viewing which orders need to be shipped, or what’s on back order.
• Stock Control: This section is for creating purchase orders, handling stock transfers, and dealing with stock adjustments. It works more or less like the tools listed above.
• B2B eCommerce: This links to the B2B eCommerce extension if you opt to use it.
• Intelligence: A collection of reporting tools. These will be covered in the Reports section below.

TradeGecko has been around for a while, and their software is pretty refined as a result. The interface is elegant and easy to navigate, and the aesthetic is on point. The different panels I mentioned above are represented as icons, arrayed in a vertical navbar that’s aligned on the left-hand side of the page. When you’re not using the navbar, it collapses, so that space on the page is maximized. TradeGecko isn’t the first company to employ this design, but still looks and feels great.

The overall workflow is simple. When you sign up, the dashboard will show you how to get your account setup, and walk you through each step. Generally, the first thing to do would be to import your products and stock information (either manually or by integrating a sales channel). Next, you can set up any other integrations you have. Finally, upload your customers and suppliers. Once your account has been configured, all the basic tasks (like creating a sales order or looking up a customer) can all be managed in a few clicks. If you get stuck at any point, a customer service representative can assist you.

I have a few issues with the software, though they weren’t all that glaring. First off, the responsive design will start to break the pages if you shrink them down to a narrow column (as I did when I was referencing another web page). Fields and drop-down menus become unusable in this circumstance.

The other issue I have is with the tutorial on the reports page. I’ll get into this more a little later, but I’ll just say the software doesn’t do a great job of explaining new reporting tools or how to get the most out of them.

Neither of these things are deal breakers by a long shot, but I do think they’re worth mentioning.

Customer Service and Technical Support:

TradeGecko has a detailed knowledge base, with step-by-step instructions for many tasks, ranging from the basic to the advanced. Here are the different customer service options:

• Community Support: Access to community guides and the help center
• Email Support: Available for Small Business plans and larger
• Phone support: Available only for Business Premium plans

My experiences with the support team over the years has been pretty mixed. The first time I reviewed this company, there were inconsistent response times, ranging from a few hours to a few days. This go-around things have been better, though the turnaround can still be up to 12 hours, even for simple tickets. Companies outside of Southeast Asia should be mindful of the time difference, as it may have a big impact on how quickly you can get in touch with a representative.

Phone support is only available for Business Premium plans, so my experience with this aspect of their company is limited. I should also mention that English is the common business language in Singapore, so fluency has never been an issue during any of my interactions with the TradeGecko team.

Negative Reviews and Complaints:

The community response to this product has become pretty polarized over the years. While I see plenty of glowing reviews online, it isn’t hard to find poor ones either.

Here’s a recent one from the Shopify App Store:

The product is pretty buggy but offers a lot of features if you’re willing to wade through the bugs and the idiosyncrasies of the way the app works (hint: refresh TG after everything you do or you’ll get very confused!).

That said, the customer service is appallingly bad. If you manage to get Oscar, he’ll at least try to help. The rest of the team appear to know nothing and not be able to understand the most basic of queries or descriptions of situations. If you uncover anything that they don’t understand, they’ll repeat useless information ad nauseam or send you to their engineers and engage you in endless run-around until you figure out a work-around for whatever went wrong with their system.

Stay away if you don’t like frustration.

– http://quinceandco.com

Here’s another one, this time pulled from the Xero Community. It’s pretty scathing:

The last 8 months of using Trade Gecko has been hell. Absolute Hell. I have opened more than 100 tickets and have wasted thousands of dollars in hiring IT support to fix their issues as well as an unknown amount of lost revenue from their software wiping my web-store and countless other problems. Today I lost 95% of my products from my website… POOF, gone!
Today was also the day I cancelled the subscription and will be seeking compensation.

– Rick Bazerghi, http://www.meir.com.au

Positive Reviews and Testimonials:

Despite what I just highlighted, TradeGecko has received plenty of great reviews in online forums, with many celebrating it as an important part of their business.

Here’s one, again from the reviews section of Shopify’s App store:

I spend at least 2 hours every single day on TradeGecko and I’m really glad I have it. There’s a lot of functionality so it took me a few days to get in the groove but when I did it was great for me to not only manage my inventory but also learn about what more I should be doing (as a first time seller everything was a learning curve).

I’ve noticed they’ve also been releasing more and more really helpful articles to help with whatever questions I have. Which is great for me so I don’t have to bother reaching out in the first place . The functionality is pretty intrinsic to use because of the design and UI.

It keeps everything in control for me and helps me keep a clear eye on the business. the main reason why I love it is how easy it is to fulfil orders- I automatically see all my shopify orders, get a easy pick list and send through customer data straight to my 3PL so it’s really smooth. And as soon as I’m done it’s so enjoyable to mark them as packed and shipped then to have them wiped from the active orders. Clean and clear, my kind of software.

Overall, TradeGecko helps me manage 100% of my backend and I would recommend it to anyone, any day.

– https://www.zahara.com

Here’s another recent review, from the same source:

We opted to install TradeGecko to expand our multi-channel operation and because managing it manually meant we had too many oversells.

With TradeGecko installed, we haven’t oversold any item for 6 weeks now. Which has lead to increased sales for us!

Excellent software, customer service and pricing!

– https://www.eightyeightstore.co.uk

Features:

TradeGecko is full of tools that make it great for managing not just your inventory but many other aspects of your business. Here are a few of my favorite features:

• Inventory Management: This is, of course, where the software excels. You can search through all of your products quickly, add a product image, track the item history and adjust pricing. The application runs nimbly on my machine (though in an environment where you’re running thousands of products/orders, the potential for a performance drop is very real). I’d recommend that any companies operating at a huge volume pay attention during their trial period, to see if they run into any bottlenecks.
• Product Images: The software allows you to upload an image or multiple images for a product. Bulk image upload is possible, but there are a few steps you need to take. First, you must upload all images to a file hosting service, and then you must input URLs for all the images into a spreadsheet, along with the corresponding product SKU in another column. Once you have this spreadsheet created, you can send it to a customer service representative, and they will manage the upload through their backend.
• Sales Orders: When you pull up a sales order, the software provides all the appropriate fields to fill out, along with drop down menus that populate with your existing customers. Integrating your sales channels means that orders are automatically synced with your inventory in real time.
• Stock Control: It’s easy to make stock adjustments, create and send purchase orders, add landed costs, and manage stock transfers between multiple locations (assuming your account includes multi-warehousing).
• Multiple Users: TradeGecko lets you create individual user accounts for your team members. You can also manage each user’s permissions to give read/write access to different parts of the software, or bar them from some sections entirely.
• Barcode Scanning: There is full support for this in TradeGecko. Most USB scanners should work fine, if you want to scan items in. Barcodes can be added by selecting a product in the inventory panel and then manually entering it next to the SKU field. Keep in mind that you’ll need a printer in order to generate barcodes.
• Multi-Warehousing: Additional locations, such as warehouses and consignment shops, can be added, depending on which plan you’re on. You can also manage stock transfers and monitor inventory levels between all your locations.
• Composite Variants: You can bundle items together or combine them to create a distinct product. If a composite variant is purchased, TradeGecko makes the appropriate adjustments to inventory levels.
• Batch/Expiry Tracking: If you have products that expire or may be jubject to recalls, TradeGecko allows you pull them all together as a “batch.” This will streamline the recall service should the need arise. I can also imagine other uses for it; being able to call up entire batches of product just seems useful.

Reports:

TradeGecko has recently updated their reporting tools, offering a new package called the “Intelligence Hub”. As I mentioned earlier, the software provides a tutorial on how to use these reports, but I didn’t find it particularly useful. It actually confused me, to be honest. It wasn’t until I had exited the walkthrough and started messing around with the reports myself that I got a feel for how they work. That could just be me, though.

All reports can be filtered by date range. Here’s what’s available:

• The Dashboard 
  • This is a graphical representation of your account that shows total sales, total costs, total profit, and units sold. You can view three main graphs to choose from:
    • Total Sales and Costs
    • Total Profits
    • Quantity
  • Directly to the right of the graphs is another panel that can be adjusted to display sales stats for the following categories:
    • Assignee
    • Customer
    • Customer Type
    • Product
    • Variant
• Sales Reports
  • This displays a bar graph for sales figures. You can edit the bar graph to include additional dimensions and metrics. It actually gives you a lot of flexibility and is definitely worth a look. Here are the different categories you can choose:
    • Assignee
    • Customer
    • Customer Type
    • Product
    • Variant
• Inventory Reports
  • This panel displays results in a spreadsheet format. The categories are as follows:
    • Inventory Stock On Hand
    • Inventory Details
    • Location
    • Reorder
    • Incoming Stock
    • Historic Inventory
• Legacy Reports
  • These are the old reports that TradeGecko used to offer. They’ve kept them around for users who prefer them to the new package.

The output for all reports can be exported as a CSV file.

Integrations and Add-Ons:

• • eCommerce: 
    • Shopify
    • Magento
    • Amazon (US, UK, Canada)
    • WooCommerce
  • Accounting:
    • Xero
    • Intuit Quickbooks Online
  • Shipping: 
    • ShipStation
    • StarShipIt
    • TradeGecko 3PL Exporter Plugin
  • Inventory Forecasting: 
    • Lokad SalesCast
  • Other: 
    • Google Drive
    • Shopify POS
    • Crossfire EDI
    • SalesForce

Security:

TradeGecko uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to securely manage, store, and backup your data.

Final Verdict on TradeGecko:

TradeGecko has a lot going for it, and the newer design choices are definitely to my liking. I’m also impressed with how quickly the application runs, at least in the demo environment. It’s the fastest I’ve seen so far.

The problems I highlighted in last year’s review are still present, however. Complaints about the support department, particularly regarding response times, are still popping up around the web. And bugs continue to be a problem. The minor glitches in the interface I mentioned are one thing, but the customer complaints I’ve seen about some of the integrations are pretty rough.

Regardless, TradeGecko continues to grow. For the time being, I’m going to keep my rating of this product at 4 stars. We’ll see what the future holds.

If you want to try it out for yourself, check out the free trial.