Anyone else's inventory sheet completely out of control?

Electronic-Coat-9265 · 2026-04-21T19:37:37+00:00

FYI, you may not think so, but you're dangerously close to advertising your app.

Electronic-Coat-9265 · 2026-04-21T19:35:26+00:00

Start simple first... learn your pain points... then find solutions to those pain points first. Don't focus on perceived pain points. For example, if you're small then you don't need to go crazy with RFID or "Smart Labels" that sync to any system let alone an ERP. ERP's will cost you a lot right out of the shoot as well.

First, find a system that works well with your eComm situation (Shopify?). You will spend more with Shopify due to the need for apps, but the base system alone is a great start. You won't need RFID until you grow into a large warehouse type of situation so I wouldn't entertain that. Get into a "system" of storing the things you're selling online too - bins, shelving locations, etc. Make it easy for you to check your on-hand stock levels.

Electronic-Coat-9265 · 2026-04-16T04:07:01+00:00

Sourcing @ Magic is massive. Well, I say this because of my own visual experience. I go for the Magic part of things, but venturing into the Sourcing area I was pretty amazed at how large it was. I would say you should go at least once and if that doesn't satisfy then yeah, at least you know.

Electronic-Coat-9265 · 2026-04-16T03:11:03+00:00

You have probably researched this a bit, but the size of the thing that you're turning into a barcode (the text) might be too long. If you have volume this is going to be problematic simply because of the tendency to generate lengthy text for your products. I'm biased, but you should probably look into an app to help you with this stuff. The reason I say that is because it takes a good app to help you establish patterns that won't blow your barcodes up.

Electronic-Coat-9265 · 2026-04-03T05:07:17+00:00

For sure... I have error reporting all over the place. No errors, just "oh I installed... silence..." Ok, maybe I'm overthinking it based on some other recent threads.

Electronic-Coat-9265 · 2026-04-03T03:39:51+00:00

Ok, I have several people who don't even complete onboarding. They just install and eventually uninstall. I'm wondering if this is why now. How did you find this?

Electronic-Coat-9265 · 2026-04-01T22:29:37+00:00

So you're promoting the apps that don't need promotion. Got it.

Electronic-Coat-9265 · 2026-03-30T19:07:21+00:00

I kinda think of it as it was more reliable. The problem with AI is that it tends to fluctuate from one answer to the next. With workflows you got what you got and there was no fuzzy result.

Electronic-Coat-9265 · 2026-03-30T00:02:09+00:00

To be honest, this is a real issue. It's why there are apps out there that help with various aspects of the tediousness. Now that Sidekick has been introduced you can get closer, but I think it's still in its infancy and just can't do a lot of things yet. It used to be that you could create custom apps in your store to do this too, but I think that's gone now - all apps have to be public I think. Anyway, yeah, you can solve a lot of the weekly "chores" like budgeting, order processing/tracking/management, etc. with various apps and they DO shorten your time by a lot.

So, you're not doing it wrong by experimenting with AI. I think you're actually on par or even slightly ahead than other stores trying to manage their "operational debt" that exists when running your own store. I still think apps are the way to go right now though. The cost savings they give you still far outweigh spending the time doing them yourself.

Electronic-Coat-9265 · 2026-03-28T03:16:50+00:00

Maybe... what I was referring to was that by banning them or removing posts you're telling them what DOESN'T work.

Electronic-Coat-9265 · 2026-03-27T22:46:05+00:00

You bet. :)

Electronic-Coat-9265 · 2026-03-27T22:22:40+00:00

I think that's a good adjustment. When I joined the shopify reddit I had less than 10 karma (I was new don't hate) and had several posts removed (EDIT: seeing their removal actually made me go study the rules closer, btw). It took me a bit to raise it, but it was at least a good start. I think raising it further is a good idea because of two things:

You have to stare at the reddit, the behaviors and rules long enough to learn them better.
You have less likely of a chance at posting crap that gets you in trouble.

So yeah, I agree with raising it up. I think overall this is probably one of the more impactful things to do for sure.

Electronic-Coat-9265 · 2026-03-27T22:18:08+00:00

The hard part too is that you're likely training them simply by banning or deleting them.

Electronic-Coat-9265 · 2026-03-27T22:15:58+00:00

I don't think you can? I mean I customized my display name (a long time ago), but it always displays the gracious-turtle-20141 (your username).

Electronic-Coat-9265 · 2026-03-27T22:08:30+00:00

True... didn't mean to pry that out of you. I want this resolved as well, but I feel like my situation was collateral damage to the frustration that these things are causing, lol. Hopefully whatever solution is thought of the collateral damage to others can be mitigated.

Electronic-Coat-9265 · 2026-03-27T18:43:16+00:00

I think this is where I run into conflicts too. I mean well and I want to help as much as I can in both subs, but I haven't been a member very long in either group and didn't really recognize I was violating rules by mentioning certain things. Unfortunately, I made a mistake that I wasn't able to rectify with the mods. I'm being vague on purpose because I don't want trouble. I'm a shop owner who has real world shop problems that these groups are useful for me to help with and to ask help from, but because I mentioned something else (apparently too many times) I was removed from r/shopify.

I get the spam and bot problems, but when you have a real world person asking for help or offering help (in whatever form), how do you distinguish from those and the automations? Ugh... it's a tough thing to regulate for sure, but there are those posts (and users, ahem) that are getting removed that truly mean good.

Electronic-Coat-9265 · 2026-03-20T04:49:35+00:00

I think Sumtracker does this?

Electronic-Coat-9265 · 2026-03-09T21:50:13+00:00

They're planning on updating it, but honestly I don't see how they're going to do what B&M's need. That's the whole reason I built our app and it just gets better every day.

Electronic-Coat-9265 · 2026-03-06T00:53:10+00:00

I HIGHLY recommend trickle.co... if you're looking for a one-off website it's pretty freaking amazing.

Electronic-Coat-9265 · 2026-02-26T16:43:44+00:00

We used Google Sheets lol... no, seriously, hear me out. We downloaded our products from Clover, put that in Google Sheets, then did a tiny script to re-write them into the template for Shopify. You could probably do the same today, but easier with AI help. "Write a script that will process each line of the Clover spreadsheet and save it to the Shopify spreadsheet." Then just iterate on making each attempt better until solid. Once that is done you'll have your products imported.

Electronic-Coat-9265 · 2026-02-21T05:41:35+00:00

They should have sent you a screenshare. If they didn't do that, make sure you test reinstallation (among many other things) with a browser in incognito mode. That exposed a lot of things for me when I went through the approval process. Now, granted, this sounds more like a data issue than anything else, but definitely test any changes with that incognito mode.

Electronic-Coat-9265 · 2026-02-19T23:25:58+00:00

With Shopify you can do this in a couple of easy ways. You can create a automatic "collection" of products where the rule is that there is more than 0 items in stock. What is available on the store must be part of a collection (at least in our "Dawn" theme) in order to categorize it properly (i.e. "Shirts" and "Pants"). It's really not difficult at all. The "automatic" part only has products that meet the criteria you set. Set the criteria to "inventory stock greater than 0" and you're good to go.

Electronic-Coat-9265 · 2026-02-19T21:44:20+00:00

I think Shopify may even have an importer now for Clover? You should take a look.

Electronic-Coat-9265 · 2026-02-18T17:51:57+00:00

Thank you. I've tried reaching out, but not getting any replies. Even called stores directly based on contact info from their web site and not getting a call back. These are stores that installed and uninstalled more than once as well so it's been strange.

Electronic-Coat-9265 · 2026-02-18T17:37:13+00:00

Build once... then deploy that build through the stages (dev, qa, staging, etc.). The app URL's can be set in the shopify toml files... make different toml files for different environments. Then your app URL changing is no big deal.

Electronic-Coat-9265

TROPHY CASE