SimpleConsign vs Cin7 Omni: Which is a better fit?

Beau: Hi, my name is Beau. I'm a consultant and I'm reviewing SimpleConsign. I give it a review of four out of five. For more reviews see below. Before we had SimpleConsign, we had a system that was written by one of our members. There were several problems. One is the member had left the organization so we had no one to maintain it. The other problem was it was missing a bunch of features that we found in SimpleConsign to help us out. We chose SimpleConsign because we needed a system which was maintained by a professional organization. We also needed several features that SimpleConsign had such as the ability to integrate with a computer and with a point of sales station. We needed someone that would give us the capabilities to have multiple users. And we needed a system that was simple to use. It was difficult getting started with SimpleConsign because we had had this home brewed system before. Once we understood how SimpleConsign worked, it was easy to set up, and we found it now very functionally valuable for us. The recommendation I have for anyone considering SimpleConsign is make sure you've written out your requirements and really understand what you're looking for before you jump into it. This is a big step for anyone. Some of the things that we didn't find in SimpleConsign that we'd love to have are an ability to link to Etsy and to eBay. The history reports that come out of SimpleConsign are not terribly valuable to the consigner. We'd like to see an email going to the consigner on a periodic basis on how well their sales have done. The user's manual was good, but it wasn't great. We've ended up rewriting the user's manual. And finally, if you are in an environment like ours, where we have four to five large sales for our arts and crafts organization per year, it's impossible in SimpleConsign to keep items in inventory from one sale to the other and be able to separate them out at that sale. Other than that, we found it a very powerful system. We have neophyte end users that are operating the system, and they're very successful with it. The time to get started is five or six minutes at most. And we found it to be a very good system. Their customer support is excellent. They answer their calls. They take them on weekends, and we've been very happy with SimpleConsign. We've had it for four or five years now. It's been a very good system for us.

Sean S.: Hi, I'm Sean. I'm an owner of a vineyard and I give Cin7 a four out of five. Prior to engaging with Cin7, we were using a variety of different software platforms to meet our needs for logistics and fulfillment. And that included MYOB as an accounting software, as well as cloud-based e-commerce software like, the [West 00:00:25] Commerce. However, they did not meet any of our needs and so we reviewed a variety of different products. The reason that they did not meet our needs, was because they didn't offer good integration with each other or offered a fully cloud integrated solution. So when we looked at other products, we looked at MYOB's cloud accounting platform, we looked at Xero, we looked at Unleashed Inventory and we looked at Magento. However, and then of course, Cin7, however, none of these really offered a full solution to be integrated. The lack of integration was a big part of the reason why we chose Cin7. When we looked at Cin7, the product is really what I would call sort of a Swiss Army Knife of options and tools. It offers logistics features, it offers inventory management, it offers order fulfillment and there's a whole other suite of options and possibilities with it. Some of which we aren't even using such as payment portals and things like that but we may integrate in the future. The problem that we found is that none of these other products that I mentioned before, we're actually able to fully work together and provide us a good ecosystem for meeting all of the needs of a business like ours. So, what we found is that Cin7 does offer a lot of opportunity and another very important feature for us as a vineyard and winery is reporting capabilities, both for sales as well as meeting tax requirements and other regulatory and compliance requirements. And that is probably the one area where Cin7 actually offered the best features out of anything else that we could put together. When it came time to integrate and onboard into Cin7, we spent a little bit of time working with their team directly. But what we did find is that it is a somewhat complex product and because it really does touch on accounting and integrates tightly with accounting software, we did need to bring in some specialists to do that integration. So we did hire a third party consultant, who did a fantastic job for us and really helped get the accounting, the sense of our prior data out of our prior platforms and order histories and inventory, and even setting up some of the structures of how we are going to transact and process oders in the business. My feeling on that was a specialist provider was the best solution for us, Cin7 does do a lot of this work in-house and offers that. But our choice after looking at the onboarding solution, in-house with Cin7, was to go with a specialist provider that could give us a more bespoken tailored fit to meet our business needs. A few things to think about when making a move into Cin7 would be to consider what are your current requirements in terms of historical data versus starting and starting with a clean slate. For us, it was very important to actually bring in a lot of our data from our prior systems and the fantastic thing is Cin7 does have very excellent tools for importation in terms of bringing data in. However, that can be an expensive and a bit of an onerous process to get it in and to get it right. So we did have to bear some additional costs to bring in things like, historical order history into Cin7 and that did come at some price. So I guess my advice to somebody else that would be to consider whether, having access to their prior systems and keeping their historical data in one location for reference is a viable solution, as opposed to going through and trying to bring everything into Cin7. If you do look at that, you will be looking at some extra effort and time to be able to make that work and probably make it work the way that you want to.