Zoho Inventory Review
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- Date Established
- 2015
- Location
- Chennai, India
Pros
- Easy to use
- Reasonable monthly cost
- Extensive integrations list
Cons
- Confusing pricing scheme
- Somewhat limited reporting
Overview
The Zoho family of products aims to meet every digital business need, from customer relations to project management, accounting, presentations, meetings, and more. In 2015, they released Zoho Inventory, a tool designed to help manage your product inventory from the moment you order from your suppliers to the instant it arrives at the homes and workplaces of your eager customers. In the years since then, the Zoho family of products has grown to over 30 million subscribers. Despite such rapid growth, all of its products, including Zoho Inventory, are designed to remain eminently usable and small-business friendly.
In the years since its creation, Zoho Inventory has steadily improved until it has become a well-loved product with numerous dedicated users around the world. Subscribers praise its simplicity, its integrations, and the reasonable price, not to mention a good mobile app, and so much more. Let’s take a closer look at Zoho Inventory and see just how well it could work for you.
Table of Contents
Pricing
Zoho Inventory offers four pricing plans to its users. Payments are made monthly, but if you buy a year at a time, you get a discount on each plan. The scalability here is nice, and even at the top tier, the program’s cost is similar to its competitors. Here are some of the details:
Free Plan
- $0/month
- 20 online orders/month
- 20 offline orders/month
- 20 shipping labels/month
- 20 shipment tracking/month
- One warehouse
- Two users
- Composite items
- eCommerce integrations
- Integrate one Shopify store
- Five automated workflows/module
Basic Plan
- $49/month
- 1,500 online orders/month
- 1,500 offline orders/month
- 150 shipping labels/month
- 150 shipment tracking/month
- Two warehouses
- 10 users
- Composite items
- eCommerce integrations
- Integrate one Shopify store
- 10 automated workflows/module
Standard Plan
- $99/month
- 10,000 online orders/month
- 10,000 offline orders/month
- 1,000 shipping labels/month
- 1,000 shipment tracking/month
- Five warehouses
- 15 users
- Composite items
- eCommerce integrations
- Integrate two Shopify stores
- 10 automated workflows/module
- Serial number tracking
- Batch tracking
Professional Plan
- $249/month
- 30,000 online orders/month
- 30,000 offline orders/month
- 3,000 shipping labels/month
- 3,000 shipment tracking/month
- 10 warehouses
- 20 users
- Composite items
- eCommerce integrations
- Integrate five Shopify stores
- 10 automated workflows/module
- Serial number tracking
- Batch tracking
Extra Costs
If you want to tailor your plan more specifically to your own needs, you can choose from the following add-ons:
- Orders & Shipping Labels: It’s $5/month for 50 orders plus 50 shipping labels.
- Additional Warehouses: You can pay $9/month for an additional warehouse (or $90/per year).
Web-Based Or Locally-Installed
Zoho Inventory is web-based, so you do not need to download anything.
Hardware & Software Requirements
Rating: Excellent
As a web app, Zoho just requires that you be able to run a compatible browser. Zoho supports:
- Safari 9 and above
- Chrome 49 and above
- Mozilla Firefox 44 and above
- Internet Explorer 11 and above
- Opera 45 and above
Zoho Inventory also offers mobile apps that are available to Apple (iOS 10.0+) and Android (4.4+).
Specific Size Of Business
Zoho Inventory is scalable, with enough plans to fit a variety of business sizes. Very small businesses can take advantage of the free plan and scale up as needed. Large businesses may find the limited number of shipping labels constraining, however. For larger businesses, take a look at our other comprehensive inventory reviews to find a better solution for your business.
Ease Of Use
Signing up for Zoho projects is a breeze. Enter your name, email, and some business information, and you are in. From there, the app is pretty intuitive to use. The interface is not what I would call beautiful, but it is functional, and everything is easy to find. I tried out the various features (sales orders, adding items), and found that Zoho’s fillable forms were simple and easy to fill out. I especially appreciated Zoho’s addition of an “easy-add” button in the upper left corner of the UI. It makes creating new items, orders, and other elements of the app simple and straightforward.
Overall, it’s an easy program to get started with, but if you’re determined, there’s a lot of nuanced customization you can do in the preferences.
Features
Rating: Excellent
Zoho Inventory is a feature-rich environment; even its features have features. With that in mind, I want to share these features in groups:
- Dashboard: The Zoho Inventory dashboard is clean and easy on the eyes, presenting key vitals in an easily parsed format. You get an overview of your sales activity, your sales orders, your top-selling items, and a graph of your total sales. Most of these components give you the option to view data by the current and previous day, current and previous week, current and previous year, or by custom timeframe.
- Inventory: Obviously, a product called Zoho Inventory is going to need to have some control over inventory. Zoho allows you to create item listings, kit items together, and even set products to automatically re-order from your suppliers when your inventory falls below whatever threshold you set. To get started, you can either import an existing inventory list in CSV or TSV format or create items and item groups directly in the program. Once you’ve created items, managing them is easy. Commonly used tasks, such as adjusting stock, have large, brightly-colored shortcuts. Headings are intuitive and quick to click through.
- Warehouse Management: These features are mostly of interest to subscribers with multiple warehouses. Zoho Inventory automatically sorts orders, so they route to the warehouse closest to the destination of that order. With streamlined communication, transferring products between warehouses is also a breeze. Handy!
- Barcode Scanning: Zoho Inventory does support barcode scanning in-app. If you don’t want to enter your SKUs by hand (and who does), you can simply highlight the SKU parameter and scan barcodes in with a synched scanner.
- Order Management & Fulfillment: Once you get orders, you are going to need to be able to pack, send, and track those orders. Zoho backs you up all the way, from accepting orders via multiple channels to creating shipping labels and interfacing with 30 different shipping agents. One frustrating thing about Zoho is that the number of shipping labels that comes with your subscription level is only one-tenth the number of the included order capacity. If you want more labels (and, of course, you will), you will need to pay extra.
- Payments: You can create invoices from the Invoice module within a specific sales order or from the Contacts page. You can receive full or partial payments for invoices.
- Purchase Orders: You can create or import purchase orders for your organization or customers from the sidebar. Zoho provides some nice little visual aids that, while not necessary, highlight the steps involved in creating purchase orders. The program gives you the option to add items in bulk or individually, attach files, and apply templates, terms, and conditions at will.
- Contact & Vendor Management: Zoho streamlines customer and vendor management through the same interface; you simply toggle between two radio buttons to enter one or the other. After entering contact info, you can add tax and payment plans, notes, and custom fields. When referencing your contacts, you can sort by customers, vendors, active, inactive, and CRM contacts.
- Sales Orders: Sales orders can be created or imported using a similar interface to that of purchasing orders, but you access the feature from a separate heading in the sidebar. Afterward, you can monitor their status.
- Returns: To process a return, you’ll need to have already created a sales order (which you presumably did) and have shipped your product. You’ll also need to make sure the item is set to returnable. Once the product is returned, if the goods aren’t defective, you can add them back to your stock. You can choose to give the customer either a refund or invoice credits. There are a few more steps here than with most of the other features, so I’d recommend watching the tutorial offered in the help doc.
- Reports: Zoho Inventory includes a couple of good reporting capabilities: you can track your overall sales, check-in on specific items or item variants, and do FIFO tracking. You can access your reports from a single dashboard and get the basics in a single glance or go deeper into the nitty-gritty if need be. They are not the most comprehensive reports I have seen, but they work pretty well.
Customer Service & Technical Support
Zoho Inventory offers 24/5 phone support along with a variety of ways to contact tech support. I didn’t have to hold long for tech support, but the reps’ knowledgeability is a bit of a roll of the dice. In most cases, you’ll probably save time and effort looking through the online documentation and help guides. Most of the customer horror stories for Zoho Inventory involve resolving more serious complaints; the company has a reputation for being unresponsive.
Zoho Inventory’s support services include:
- Phone: 24/5 phone support.
- Email: You can reach support through email.
- Support Form: You can also submit a ticket with your contact information and a description of your problem.
- Beginner’s Guide: The program optionally walks you through some of the program’s basic features.
- In-Software Help: You can easily access help FAQs within the program from the upper right-hand corner of your screen.
- User Guide: This comprehensive guide is a good place to go when trying to understand the nuts and bolts of Zoho Projects. It isn’t the first place I would go to look, but it is comprehensive.
- Feature Requests: I always like it when I see companies demonstrate a clear desire to listen to their customers. Once you make your requests, other users can vote for it if they agree that it would improve the overall platform.
- Webinars: Zoho Inventory runs a webinar every Tuesday, walking new and prospective users through the intricacies of the app.
- Forums: Sometimes, it can be helpful to ask and answer questions in a public sphere. By leveraging its entire community, Zoho Projects bring a wide variety of expertise and experience into the fold, increasing the likelihood that your questions will get answered.
- Videos: You can find these within the user guide and on YouTube.
- Social Media: Zoho has a media presence on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
User Reviews
Negative Reviews & Complaints
For the most part, users seem to have positive experiences with Zoho Inventory. However, the company does have a record of being slow to respond to customer complaints, which garners it a D- rating with the BBB. Here are a few of the most commonly identified trouble spots:
- Doesn’t Work With All Shipping Companies: This was one of the most common complaints I saw. If Zoho doesn’t integrate with your preferred shipping company, you won’t be able to ship products through the app. The app, though, does play nicely with most major shipping companies; if you are in the US or Europe, you should be just fine.
- Frustrating Invoices: I saw several complaints that the invoices generated in Zoho Inventory leave a little to be desired. There are several different specific elements that users found frustrating. It may be that the best fix would be to ask the developers to make the invoice forms customizable.
- Limited Reports: As I note below, the reporting features in the app are somewhat limited. There is nothing wrong with the reports as they are, but their overall scope and scale are somewhat lacking compared to other apps I have seen.
- Generic: A few customers didn’t care for what they described as the generic feel of the app.
Positive Reviews & Testimonials
As I mentioned, most Zoho Inventory users are pleased with their experiences. Zoho Inventory rates 4.5 out of five stars on G2Crowd. Most users were satisfied with the program, some exceptionally so.
Users liked the following:
- Breadth Of Features: Zoho Inventory combines most of the activities you could associate with inventory management into a single place.
- Free Option: Zoho Inventory offers a free plan for small businesses and people who want to try the software out, making it low risk to try.
- Out Of The Box Utility: Many users appreciated that Zoho Inventory is useful even without much configuration and customization.
- Integrates With Other Zoho Products: If you’re using Zoho CRM or Zoho Commerce, you’ll have an easy time getting those products to work with each other.
Here’s what a few users are saying:
This software is extremely easy to use, flows well, loads quickly, and provides great flexibility for a number of business needs.
Tightly integrated with Zoho Books and other Zoho tools for automation and data sharing. Ease of use. Good mobile app. Very good integration with shipping vendors.
This is a great product for managing inventory. You can set different kinds of levels and get alerts. Recommended product.
Very complete! I like the overall feel and UI for this software. I like how it was thought about and implemented. I like that it offers many integrations and generally can do nearly everything I need it to do. I like how it is like lego’s, I can select one module and then when ready set up another Zoho module and they will work together. Overall I like the product.
Zoho Inventory is a powerful tool that allows us an adequate and standardized classification of our chemical samples, converting them into information that can be inventoried, leaving as a result the organization that every company or corporation in charge of the chemical area wants, that is, a sample coherently organized. For this reason we strongly recommend this software.
Overall it is a great software that will help you to grow your business and have control of it in a very easy way. From the beginning it is easy to set up and configure all the needed settings.
Integrations & Add-Ons
Zoho Inventory makes it easy to parse integrations by breaking them down into categories (shipment tracking, shipping channels, Zoho Commerce, Marketplace, Shopping Cart, Online Payments, Accounting, CRM, Avalara, Chat, EDI, Advanced Analytics, and Other Apps). Some, such as shipment tracking, have only one option, while others, such as shipping channels, have 69. One big advantage of using Zoho Inventory is easy integration with other Zoho products, such as Zoho Commerce and Zoho CRM.
Zoho Inventory has an API that allows you to access the operations of the web client.
Security
Zoho Inventory takes privacy seriously and allows you to designate information as Personally Identifiable, thereby securing it against fraud. On the technical side, Zoho Inventory keeps its server sites secure, even with bullet-proof walls. Its network is encrypted using TLS 1.2 protocols with certificates issued by SHA 256 based CA. As cloud-based software, the whole app is designed with redundancies to ward against failure.
Final Verdict
So when all is said and done, is Zoho Inventory worth your time and money? If you want my hot take (and let’s face it, you are reading this review for a reason, right?), then Zoho Inventory is best suited for smaller businesses. The reasoning is that it has relatively simple reporting, a minimal invoice system, and a pricing plan that seems to favor smaller locations. Many of Zoho’s biggest shortcomings only fail to measure up for companies with many warehouses or lots of employees. Perhaps this is one of those scenarios where a product should be judged based on what it was designed for, not what people try to force it to do.
But don’t just take my word for it; give it a whirl yourself by signing up for the free trial and discovering just how good a fit Zoho Inventory will be for your business.
Wesley Kriz
Writing from the Pacific Northwest (read: the Best Coast), Wesley graduated from George Fox University in 2014 with a degree in History, then again from George Fox in 2016 with a Masters of Arts in Teaching. He has been writing about project management for 2 years, and keeps a running list of wacky software brand names; seriously, it's wild out there.
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