I'm about to go through a process of potentially changing the e-commerce software that is the backbone of the small business I own.
This is a major re-engineering project for the business, so I thought I'd document it on Hive. This should both help me document what I've done, and might also be of interest to anyone going through a similar process.
Image by REDQUASAR from Pixabay
Our e-commerce business currently uses a package called Linnworks as the core operational software. It handles synchronisation of inventory across sales channels, order processing, shipping label generation and manifesting, despatch notification to channels, purchase order processing and a certain amount of reporting, as well as a few other minor tasks.
We have been using it for about 10 years. I'd say that I used to be a super-fan of theirs a few years ago. However, they were taken over by a venture capital company about 3 or 4 years ago, and the original management team was replaced shortly afterwards.
Under the new management, it is clear Linnworks has made a decision to focus on enterprise-level customers and gradually ditch the micro-businesses like ourselves. It's their right to make that decision, but it leaves us out in the cold !
This has mainly been done by making design changes in the software. In particular, they introduced a new cloud-based iteration of the software (".net") to replace the original relatively slick Desktop version. At the time, they promised Desktop would be available to legacy customers for as long as they continued to use it.
This wasn't exactly true. More and more functionality has been removed from Desktop and moved to .net. In the process, each module has been totally redesigned, with functionality used by small businesses removed and replaced with systems far more useful to large customers with teams of people on hand.
They've made it far more complex to learn and use, which is great if you are part of a company divided up into teams each of which only has to perform a single function and is willing to accept clunkier processes as the price for additional complexity/flexibility. None of which we need. A couple of changes in the last week have changed key functionality we use daily from something we can do with a couple of keystrokes, to a far clunkier method (and in one case, impossible to replicate by any method other than downloading a massive report and analysing it out each day).
So while Linnworks may still be a good piece of software for some businesses, it feels like it's just no longer right for us.
The hard bit is going to be switching from a bunch of known issues and bugs to an exciting new set of unknown issues and bugs !
Existing items that I need to deal with;
In the next post, I'll move onto part 3, which involves the fun of downloading 10 years' worth of data. I plan to go into a bit of depth on this one !
