TradeGecko Review
- 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
- 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:
- 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
- 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:
- 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
- This panel displays results in a spreadsheet format. The categories are as follows:
- 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:
- Shipping:
- Inventory Forecasting:
- Other:
- eCommerce:
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.
Is it the best inventory management software out there? I am not sure. The problems I highlighted in last year’s review are still present. 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.
16 Comments
Promised the world. If you cannot handle the integration yourself making the links to XERO, importig and ammanding spreadshetts to iport , upload and downlioad products to appear correctly in your B2B store. I suggest that you look elsewhere. Tradegecko is not interested in supporting their subscribers beyond the simplest help. Their Partner portal for integrators is totally outdated. Many companies we contacted no longer had capability or knowladge of Tradegecko. I informed Tradegecko of this in writing. 7 months later they are still touting this non existant "Integrator Support" We could not find assistance to integrate our business. However we were locked in for 12 months payment. At the end of our annual subscription the sales people are all over it trying to suck another 12months of moneyy out of their dissatisfied client.
I appreciate TradeGecko's effort to have a competitive software package, but their offering is still far away from that. Their programming skills seem questionable since the company I work for had to hire and pay for our own programmer that would fix their problems... So we can have a reliable serviceSeems that their marketing strategy is to make it very compatible (see the list of add-ons above); hence, marketableas "compatible". I appreciate that too; however, Tradegecko seems to be implementing what they know... I question what that is, including but not limited to accounting procedures, programming, warehouse operations or work experience. These are some of the problems I have had so far because I have to use this software:Returns can only be attached to an invoice, so if the customer does not provide the original invoice number, we can't do anything in TradeGecko - adjust in QB and then we have to adjust the quantities in TradeGecko. NOTE that our customers are retailers so if their clients return an item they are also clueless. Still ongoing problem.We run a sales history report to show invoices paid within a time period, the report returns invoices created on said time period that are paid. New problem, but the report used to work.We want a sales report showing all sales reps in one report, we can only run reports showing one sales rep at a time or all sales without sales rep information. Ongoing problem.Connectivity is very slow, we are in the U.S. running Windows 10 desktops and don't know where their servers are. Still ongoing problemWe have to refresh the screen every time we enter information, otherwise the new data may not update on it's own. It can take anywhere from 10-30 seconds before I stop seeing the "logging into your account hello[user]". Still ongoing problemInventory turnover is very important, but they don't offer a default report showing stock valuation per date. It's either today's information or we have to add a code string at the end of another report to see the value at a specific date. Ongoing problemReading the reviews below, seems that I'm not alone on getting a really bad service.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I just signed up. Did the free trial for a couple of days and then thought, it can’t be this bad. I’m sure if I sign up things will change, like being able to create my own skin or customise the look and feel a little bit more to suit my brands. WRONG! This thing is such crap. I’ve been a paying customer for 1 day and already regret it.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
TradeGecko has to be one of the worst software. I've been using it for over a year. The only reason I haven't switched sooner is because I have been carefully studying alternatives. The list of problems is long, and worse, their customer service does not understand how to run a business. Short list of problems, in Canada it does not calculate taxes properly (often off by a penny due to rounding), orders with Free shipping from shopify have no tax and therefore blocks the sync with QBO, sync errors are not reported properly, purchase orders do not allow additional costs payable to 3rd party, cannot manually input landed cost price, no way to record customer payment discounts (ie 2% 10 days, net 30) therefore double accounting required, My list goes on and on. I suggest you stay away from TG. Dear Systems looks promising for a small business, but I'm changing for a real ERP system.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Andrew!
We are experiencing similar problems. I’m curious. What “real ERP system” are you considering for a replacement?
Thanks for sharing.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
we have been checking out tradegecko for the last 2 months , we have paid for our trial period for this period to check out all the features ...Its nicely made and designed however WE HAVE NEVER SEEN SUCH A BAD BAD BAD responding support ...it takes 1-2 weeks with all the emails which goes back and forth to solve a simple case ...For every email send you have to wait 2-3 days to get repsond , even its the same ticket ...This is unacceptable !
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Update:Same issues as before happening again, and despite promises of the issues being fixed, they have not been.We are sick and tired of spending time and money manually reconciling orders between Tradegecko and Xero. It has been a year now. I want to focus on my business, not deal with Tradegecko all the time.We have been paying our accountants around US$1,000 extra a month for the extra work, on the assumption that these issues will be fixed. Tradegecko have now told us that they cannot provide a solution, and suggested we migrate to DEAR or Unleashed (another US$2,500 cost to us).Tradegecko have told us that the issues we are experiencing is also affecting other customers of theirs.=== We have been using Shopify POS/ Tradegecko/ Xero for over a year, and it has caused us issues from the beginning. I would strongly recommend against signing up for Tradegecko and go for Dear Systems instead, at least until the issues below are resolved.We also have an ice cream business using Shopify POS/ Dear/ Xero and it has been seamless. The volume of transactions is even more for ice creams.The issue is simple: when we sell in Shopify, the orders are meant to flow through to Tradegecko and then Xero. The synchronisation does not always work, and we end up having to manually reconcile almost on a daily basis. Sometimes it's all ok, but on most days we have to spend between 10 minutes and 3-4 hours working out the issues. It is driving our accountant crazy.Support is helpful and friendly, but it's been months and the problem continue to be a real drag on our small business. We are also very tired of explaining our situation to 20+ times to different people in technical support.Also, like many businesses, we take a variety of payment methods from cash to credit cards to debit cards etc. Dear Systems can separate these payment methods into different control accounts in Xero, so you can match the amounts to the bank statements. In Tradegecko, we have to manually export all the orders and run pivot tables etc. This takes 20 minutes a day every single day. We have better things to do with our time.Other businesses may be different to ours (we sell sweets and chocolates) and may not have issues with Tradegecko. If you are starting a new business, you want something hassle free. Once you sign up to something like Tradegecko, it is also a big disruption to your business if you decide to change systems.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I'm curious how TG receives such great reviews when their glorified mobile app doesn't work.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Chris,
Thanks for your comment. Can you give our readers a little bit more detail about your experience?
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Chris,
Do check out our brand new TradeGecko Sales App which we’ve just launched in December! More information can be found here: https://www.tradegecko.com/mobile-sales-catalog-app-ios. Cheers!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I am a TradeGecko Business Premium user and prior to committing to TG, I tried out several of the competing products. As a small business, TG offered the best value for us. We started with the Basic plan to get familiar with it, but quickly upgraded twice to get the features we needed as we are growing; like additional user accounts, multiple warehousing, bin locations as well as API access. We are currently working with integrating with an unsupported sales channel. Will let you know how that goes in the coming months.
The one key feature that clinched it for us was the ability to create composite orders (different from variants) in that we can create a product that is made up of multiple finished goods in our inventory. When a composite item is ordered, it will draw down on the inventory of the item that make up the composite. I was not able to find a competing product (at this price level) that would do this.
One last note; Orderhive would have been my second choice. Curious to not see a review of it by MerchantMaverick.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Kevin,
Thanks for the information and please let us know how your project with the custom integration goes!
I’m with you on Composite Orders. I’ve updated the review to highlight this great feature.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I agree with most of what is mentioned.Having tested and a fair number of Inventory module, we have decided to stock with TG despite of a couple of crucial shortcomings, hopefully to be added sooner than later.The only major drawback for us is same as Mrs B mentioned, lack of support for BOM or Completed products. The way TG uses composite products (when trying to use it for Finished goods) does not display the correct amount of stock on hand, but rather the amount that you are able to manufacture from the raw items you have in stock. I would like to see them adding a very basic version of BOM or Finished goods manufacturing. If you keep this in mind, TG will do a good job with the rest. We are synchronising WooCommerce, TG and Xero seamlessly without any problems. If you have some special requirements like we did (i.e. syncing orders with on-hold and pending payment statuses as well) you can achieve these with some basic coding skills and pointers from the excellent sales/support team at TG.Seeing that TG is aimed at smaller businesses, I do not see the need for an extensive BOM and Batch manufacturing module to the likes of Dear or Unleashed, which may seems a bit 'intimidating' to first time Small-Medium business user. Very basic batch manufacturing should suffice which can be further developed with some feedback from users.Hope this helps anyone 🙂
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Ted,
Thanks for the review. TradeGecko seems to be great in all areas except when it comes to BOM and moving a created item (eg. Hampers) to different locations! It’s doable but they must be invoiced. I wish the had that internal transfer option – then here would be the perfect system!
Thanks again.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Tina,
Looking at the straight monthly prices (when paying by the month, not annually), Stitch and Lettuce both appear to have plans that are a little cheaper than TG’s. So does SalesBinder. But definitively quantifying which software offers the best value for which types of businesses is a little tricky, since you’ve also got to take into consideration the various features you get with each of these vendors for the price: integrations, number of products and orders per month, number of users, customer service, and so on. Personally, I think TG does offer quite a bit for the money, so you may be right that it’s one of the best inventory management deals out there right now. If you do start using TradeGecko, we’d love to know what you think of it!
Ted
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hey Ted, thanks for the detailed review above. When you say Trade Gecko is more on the expensive side for smaller businesses (like myself) compared to some competitors, can you say who these competitors are? I’ve been comparing Trade Gecko with Stitch Lab, Lettuce and eCommHub and I actually thought Trade Gecko had a pretty good deal going on but maybe that’s not the case!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.