Zoho Inventory

Score9 out of 10

16 Reviews and Ratings

What is Zoho Inventory?

Zoho Inventory is a cloud-based inventory management solution designed for small to midsize businesses. It features inventory management modules including reporting and analysis, and lot traceability. It features mobile compatible apps for Android and iOS devices.

Zoho Inventory offers additional capabilities such as built-in shipment estimating, and tracking and delivery confirmation features that allow users to invoice, ship and track products. The solution allows users to create purchase orders, backorders, and drops shipments. Users can track every item in the inventory with serial number and batch tracking features.

Zoho Inventory integrates with multiple e-commerce sites such as eBay, Shopify, Etsy, and Amazon. It is priced at a monthly subscription based on the number of orders processed per month.

As a Zoho product, the solution is integrated within the Zoho Finance Suite. As such, it also integrates with books, Zoho’s accounting, and bookkeeping solution.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

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Verified User

Manager in Sales (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Zoho Inventory for our eCommerce offshoot and it feeds our retail website and also our eBay Store. There have been plans to also include Amazon as an offering but, to date, this has not been implemented. We initially needed a simple and cheap inventory management program to enable us to maintain good audit trails within the business and to provide a simple method of tracking and retaining customers.

Pros

It is simple to use.
Does all the basics well.
Is able to integrate with our CRM.

Cons

A little too linear, there could be more room for changing processes to fit business needs.
Inventory assumes everybody works the same way and needs to be more customizable.
Integrations with Shopify could be better.

Most Important Features

Multi Warehousing.
Good basic user package.
Reordering

Return on Investment

It has allowed us to track the small inventory we have for online sales.
We have been able to raise orders more efficiently.
Allowed eComm department to become self sufficient.

Alternatives Considered

Shopify Plus

Other Software Used

Shopify Plus, Zoho Projects, Zoho Forms, Zoho Books

Verified User

C-Level Executive in Information Technology (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it to manage and track our inventory along with serialized stock. It works in tandem with Zoho CRM and Zoho Books. Quotes are converted and the sales orders appear in Zoho Inventory where the warehouse processes the order and ships.

It's possible to pull pick slips but because the system does not have bin locations you don't know where the items are located. If you have a large warehouse this makes it very difficult. Customizing sales order templates, packing slips is difficult. For example if you want to add pick notes to line items you need to be an expert in HTML to design your your template because the pick note will show on invoices also!

Pros

Tracks which orders have been shipped
Tracks which orders have been packed
Tracks with orders have been invoiced
Works well with Zoho Books

Cons

Templates within Zoho Inventory are very weak. You can't customize many including package slips, shipment docs, etc...
When an order has multiple packages, it's next to impossible to find the item you are looking for. Scenario, a large order has many packages and a customer has cancelled one of the items. You must click through every package to find the item, edit the package and remove it before you can cancel the item.
The reports within Inventory are extremely basic and many of them are useless
The packing slip module is useless as it does not print out bin locations
It's an inventory management system but it does not have bin locations
The backorder system is useless. If you "backorder" something then the whole order is locked until the backorder arrives in. Scenario.... a client orders 20 items, 1 is on backorder. You "backorder" that one item but want to ship the other 19... not possible. The order gets completely locked.
You can't print out RMA requests. There is just no option to do it, you have to do a screen shot
Integration with Amazon or other 3rd party e-commerce providers is troublesome.

Most Important Features

Tracking inventory
Tracking inventory serials
Being able to easily pick orders and manage which needs picked and shipped

Return on Investment

Coming from QuickBooks enterprise with inventory add-on it's an improvement in tracking stock because it restricts so much of what you do.
Migrating to Inventory was a bit of a nightmare. I'd recommend starting clean or bring as little data as possible.

Alternatives Considered

QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise

Verified User

Employee in Marketing (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We had various warehouses all holding different types of stock, certain items could only be held at certain locations, and keeping a track of the whereabouts of the entire inventory was almost impossible. Lots of items were either lost or misplaced for sometimes weeks at a time, Zoho we hoped would fix the problem and help speed up our order processing

Pros

Manage multiple sites
Stock transfer
Integration

Cons

Reporting
Customer support
Pointless features

Most Important Features

Manage multiple warehouses
Better insights into warehouse management
Manage sales and purchase orders

Return on Investment

We stopped using it as it was difficult to set up.
Zoho offers a lot of features but the depth of its functionality proves limited as your demands increase.

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