Stitch Labs has been acquired by Square | Hacker News Reader

Stitch Labs has been acquired by Square

stitchlabs.com

88 pointssimonsarris60 comments

That's a nice Friday surprise..! My company is in the process of migrating from an in-house ecommerce platform to Shopify and we picked Stitchlabs for ... that piece (inventory mgmt? warehouse mgmt?). Oh well!

Any suggestions for a "modern"[1] piece of software that plays the role of Stitch, specifically in a set up with Shopify?

1: I ended up being pretty disappointed with Stitch. My fault for not checking deeper, but I thought they would have an API, at least. Nope, they use sftp for integration to sales channels they don't "natively support". That's what I mean by "modern": does it have an API that you don't have to pay >$2k/mo to access.

I'm curious as well, their inventory fulfillment + content management seemed pretty awesome. Im curious what alternatives there are out there.

same, had a really bad experience with Stitch. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of custom middleware connections between Shopify and Shipstation. InfoPlus is another one that was pretty decent when I used it several years ago.

Finale Inventory is a multichannel inventory management solution that has a Shopify integration. The Platinum plan is $649/month, it includes API access and unlimited integrations.

Disclosure: I'm a software engineer at the company, not a business owner that uses the software.

Finale co-founder and CTO here. We've been in the SaaS inventory management space since 2011 and are bootstrapped so you won't have to worry about us disappearing because investors stop supporting the company.

If you have any questions about Finale: chris@finaleinventory.com

Hey! I'm obviously biased but I thought you might be interested in what we're building over at fulfil.io.

For one, we have a 100% open API that's included in our subscription.

if you're interested you can message me directly at luke.chesney@fulfil.io, would love to show you the product

I haven’t seen the product in a couple of years, but your team has always stood out as uniquely knowledgeable and deliberate with your approach. You are getting the data models right in a way that I don’t think others are. For anyone reading — I think these folks are worth a look. We have used many (MANY) of the solutions mentioned here and if Fulfil has been able to get it right - it should be great.

WooCommerce is a pretty popular product - would be nice if that was supported (we are migrating off Stitch Labs too).

The problem is WooCommerce isn't a product. It's a framework and it depends on your implementation as to whether or not you're going to have a good time with one inventory management system or another.

In direct comparison to Shopify, when you uninstall a Shopify plugin you have zero risk of lingering effects. You can't install a plugin that will break your API in "please hire better developers" ways, and Shopify doesn't give you enough power to harm yourself with "infinite variant" issues or un-trackable products.

Even with WPEngine which takes much of the complexity away of improperly sized machines or databases you still are able to destroy your ability to interface with other software through variant madness or overzealous plugins.

That being said we support it and our customers are happy who use it and get through the initial hurdles but it's very much up to your team or in most cases the outsourced help as to whether or not you're compatible.

Ordoro https://www.ordoro.com/ could be a good alternative (Disclosure: I am the co-founder of Ordoro). Ordoro works well with Shopify and has an open API. We've successfully migrated users from Stitch Labs to Ordoro in the past.

+1 for Ordoro if you’re on Shopify

I have used finale, stitch and DEAR

Of the 3, DEAR was the best value. Finale is good but extremely expensive. I would not recommend stitch.

In all cases i have been the key user becoming the SME for the team on the SAAS. Idont have a horse on this race, only sharing my experience

Good luck!

Boop from ShipHero. Stitch isn't really a WMS. If you need a WMS and are on Shopify, did you check us out? We tend to get those brands (we power about $5 Billion of annual ecommerce GMV).

My team has worked with their API and had a lot of grievances with it.

Regarding API openness vs flat file.. we in the OMS space have our hands tied by the WMS, ERP and EDI world. Investment in an open API doesn't really have any ROI it's actually more of a money pit than anything. Most of the high value integrations are with antiquated systems where all of the connectivity is flat file CSV, XML, EDI type thing. It's awful.

There's also very very slim margins the shipping / fulfillment middleware market. It's incredibly costly to maintain these legacy proprietary connections, mission critical to the business so near constant customer service requests with complex "we're on fire" troubleshooting, and nobody wants another expense lumped onto their shipping costs so it's very hard to justify paying a premium.

Not surprised that any company in this space backed by VC is getting dumped by their investors like a hot pile of bricks. OMS is about consultation and pain endurance, not venture exits

Thanks for the explanation. I had some vague sense something like this was the case but wouldn't know where to even start looking for a confirmation of that sense. This makes the pieces fall into place, thanks!

Hey, I’m the CEO of TradeGecko.com - and we’ve been focusing on solving this problem for a long time now.

We’ve got an open API and a sales channel SDK, happy to see if we can help.

Cameron at tradegecko dot com

Having worked with TradeGecko a lot through customers, you guys seem like a good option for anyone on Stitch currently (And yes, I enjoy your API so much more than the Stitch API).

Thanks!

Also, we're focused on SMB omni-channel product based businesses, we're not as focused on super-high volume DTC brands -- Skubana is a good option if that's your business profile.

Skubana is also a great platform. Good to see you guys working in partnership.

I am the Cofounder and CEO of Zentail (S12), I'm not sure exactly what you were looking to achieve with stitch, but we offer pretty robust backend ecommerce infrastructure and we integrate with all of the major storefronts and marketplaces. Happy to chat to see if we could help, also happy to answer any questions here

[Edit] (we do offer a pretty robust api)

Hi,

This is the founder of https://sumtracker.com

We have a superb integration with shopify. Please give us a try. Email me at hello@sumtracker.com

I will schedule a demo with you. We can manage all operations for your warehouse, fulfilment and shipping.

If you’re looking to do real-time stock level syncing as well as bundling/kitting, check out Trunk. We integrate with Shopify, Amazon, eBay, Faire, Square, Squarespace, and Etsy. We have a superb integration with Shopify as you can see from our app listing reviews: https://apps.shopify.com/trunk

https://trunkinventory.com

P.S. I’m the founder, happy to answer any questions

We've migrated a number of operations off of Stitch after they recently forced upgrades to Stitch X and took away features their customers depend on that we offer.

I'd be happy to review your needs and make sure you find the right software out there.

I'm Head of Product at SKULabs.

I am the cofounder of Picqer. We provide modern warehouse management software for e-commerce businesses. We are here for 8 years, bootstrapped and profitable. We have a modern and open API, see picqer.com/api.

Definitely worth checking out Veeqo as a potential solution for your inventory and shipping.

Directly integrates with all major ecommerce channels (Shopify, WooCommerce, Amazon, Etsy, Walmart etc), features one click shipping label printing, and offers discounts of up to 90% on USPS shipping rates.

Veeqo also comes with open API access for all users across all plans, in case you need to build on top of it with any additional functionality.

You can try it free for 14 days via the Veeqo website, and it's pretty quick and easy to get set up. Let me know if I can help you at all with it!

(Disclaimer - I work for Veeqo)

Fiddle (fiddle.io) is a great option also. I'm the technical cofounder of Fiddle. Fiddle is much cheaper than stitch, (no contract & month to month) and has advanced inventory features for brands and manufacturers. Fiddle stands out if you are doing kitting/bundling, assembly, or anything to do with a bill of materials. We also have a nice Shopify integration.

That is a bold move. It is not easy as a warehouse to switch for your WMS software. So to give all your customers ~6-8 months to switch to something else is not a nice move.

They were pretty big on the Shopify App Store alone and had decent pricing, 500 dollar per month and up. Should be a perfectly nice business.

But seems that they did not do any new releases the last 8 months: https://stitch.releasenotes.io/

M&A process is pretty draining, so that could explain the 8 months of inactivity.

Maybe a little, but if you want to acquire the business for the product than it is weird to let your product completely stagnate. If your team cannot keep shipping while other things happening, is it really worth to acquire?

There were some rumours floating around for about that long of them potentially shutting down. The rumors didn't mention the acquisition part, but they turned out to be accurate about an impending shutdown. It was also clear from the last 6+ months that the platform was stagnant.

any idea why they’d shut down? are they not raking in money hand over fist? are they profitable?

It's a surprisingly crowded space they are in, and I didn't get the impression they were seeing any growth, at least not enough for a VC backed company.

how familiar are you with the space they are in? can you name some of their competitors? from what i can tell, they were basically competing at the $999/mo price range for inventory management software to tie into Amazon/eBay/Shopify

Skubana, TradeGecko, Zoho Inventory, Infoplus, Dear Systems, CoreCommerce, Cin7, DSCO, Nexternal, and Unleashed are a few that immediately come to mind, but there are tons more out there. There are lots which are also an ERP or WMS rolled into one, but since Stitch Labs was not that I tired to list ones that were mostly or exclusively similar to Stitch Labs.

Overall pretty shocking as they were pitching to be an ERP replacement for e-commerce. Anyone who was using Stitch Labs as an ERP-light is going to have a substantial amount of pain migrating in a hurry.

I've referred some of Stitch Labs biggest customers to their platform, so I feel particularly guilty about their being sunset in an acquihire like this.

If anyone needs advice about what to do, I'm well versed in the area of OMS & ERP migrations. Linkedin is in my profile

Stitch labs slag off ERP a lot. What're your thoughts on NetSuite? I know lots of fast growing companies that use it.

Ran a business that started on stitch. What a painful piece of software that is. We had a heavily custom integration to their api and very high order volume. Moved to NetSuite, built many a customization and integration. NetSuite is great, but expensive and you will find the developer experience painful. As an ERP without investing heavily in customization it does a great job.

SuiteScript has improved, there's now intellij plugins and they've recently upgraded the supported JS version which runs on Graal VM. It's still a little clunky but that's just ERP for you.

I'm seeing some customers pay around 50 - 80k AUD per year on 1 - 2 year terms at the moment. What would you consider expensive?

I'd love to hear about your thoughts on where things in this area are going. We provide an in-house, completely customizable ERP system for wholesale distributors, many of which have started selling directly to consumers via Amazon, Shopify, etc.

Since joining, I've provided direct integrations between these channels and our ERP (it's an old system installed on-premises). We're in the middle of reinventing the company's attempts at e-commerce to a SaaS model. It seems like Stitch Labs was trying to downplay the role of an ERP, but based on our customers it seems like it's still needed.

> Longer term, we plan to sunset Stitch Lab’s products so the team can focus on building out Square tools

Looks like it was an acqui-hire

> We are still in the early stages of this process, but in the future we also plan to share information on how you can migrate to Square, if you choose to do so.

They have customers that they hope to move to the acquiring company. It's not just about the talent.

That's a really odd statement since Stitch's main feature is multi-channel inventory synchronization and Square doesn't do that at all.

It sounds like they’ll be building tools that do stuff like that on core Square product.

Stitchdata.com, the maker of the ETL tools Stitch and Singer.io, is a different company (and is not being acquired).

Neither is STITCH, the digital fashion design startup :)

Isn't that Stitch Fix?

Nope, that's yet another Stitch! This one is https://www.stitchdesignlab.com/

They were acquired by Talend in late 2018, I think.

same too, at first I reckoned it was stitchdata. alas, so many stitches.

> "We were drawn to Square’s purpose of economic empowerment."

Is a fun way to say "We're rich!!!!"

Can't say I'm surprised. Been a customer for years. Had many issues, was regularly frustrated by support and by the software rewrites.

This feels like if they were more customer-focused and more circumspect about raising money (they raised $23M) they would have had a nice, profitable business.

I've heard good things about https://www.finaleinventory.com/ but haven't tried them yet.

If you are looking for a multi channel listing, inventory sync, and order management check us out at https://sellergrip.com

i'm sure there will be some people disappointed by this, but it seems like a pretty ideal way to do a acquihire-and-shutdown.

there's no bullshit or ambiguity about how the product will continue despite us all knowing it won't, just a clear end-date far enough in the future that nobody can reasonably complain about it.

Is there an alternative to the service from Stitch labs? I didn't hear about them until now and I can see the application of their service. But Im worried with the acquisition, it'll become obsolete and push users to Square.

There are many. Their feature sets vary a lot.

We've had numerous of their customers flock to us over the last six months due to a lack of customer support and evolving product changes that diverted from customer needs like the removal of scan verification.

We're a pretty solid replacement and recently hit a record 30 minute migration for one customer today. If you have any questions about the process we'd be happy to at least point you in the right direction even if it's not us (SKULabs).

I work at Brahmin Solutions. Check out Brahmin Solutions https://www.brahmin-solutions.com

We have worked with dozens of customers over the past 8-10 months trying to migrate from Stitch Labs. We can be an alternative as we cover most of their features and more. If you are a manufacturer we might be an even better fit than having to use Netsuite.

Acquihire? How do these usually work? Who approaches who?

What do they do? And why are they unique or special?

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