Comment by Axsuul | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Axsuul | Hacker News Reader

I run Trunk[1][2] which is a SaaS that helps businesses manage and sync their inventory in real-time between everywhere they sell (e.g. Amazon, eBay, Shopify, Etsy, Squarespace, Square, Faire). It's my main source of income.

Starting out, I got my first 10 customers for Trunk by talking to users on e-commerce forums and focusing only on features that would help solve their problem. I didn't have any account management features (forgot password, change password, etc) or even obvious features that would make their lives easier (filtering, proper search, etc) for an embarrassingly long time. I still don't have a lot of these things! And the pricing page still... the horror. Instead, I dedicated all my energy to making sure inventory syncing covered all edge cases and worked reliably.

COVID-19 has actually contributed to an uptick in business, especially with brick & mortar businesses that are now looking to also go online.

1. https://trunkinventory.com

2. http://apps.shopify.com/trunk

This type of tool is really interesting. I have a couple of questions related to this:

1. What are the alternatives if they don't use a service like Trunk? 2. What have you seen as the "source of truth" for inventory? Is it Trunk or one of the services that Trunk connects to?

Hey appreciate the interest!

1. The alternative is manually adjusting stock levels on your other sales channels as things sell. For small shops, this is not too bad. It's usually the owner or some assistant who handles this but it can be a huge timesink. For high volume stores, this is a sisyphean task. Or you can just set stock high enough and not worry about it while emailing customers if you're actually out of stock and can't fulfill. Not a good idea though since you can get banned on marketplaces for overselling + it's a bad customer experience. Sometimes the sales channels themselves have their own integrations (e.g. Shopify integrates with eBay) but they have lots of issues

2. The "source of truth" before using Trunk is typically either Shopify/Squarespace or Square POS (for brick & mortar). So initially, Trunk can sync your most accurate sales channel to others that are out of sync. Once using Trunk, the inventory within Trunk essentially becomes the source of truth but it doesn't necessarily need to be managed there. For example, you are free to adjust stock levels within Etsy and Trunk will pick up on those changes automatically and sync them to Shopify, just as you'd expect. So it's flexible in that sense and gets out of your way/adapts to your workflow

I hope that info helped :)

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