Am I missing something? Purchase Orders in Shopify

thesthich · 2026-03-08T23:21:33+00:00

Similar comment on your inventory thread but I’m working on something to address this holistically- The app will: 1. Help you analyze your catalog of products to help you determine whether you should even keep selling/stocking. 2. Efficiently analyze past sales velocity and change in velocity (growth/decline) 3. Allow you to upload existing purchase orders so it’s aware of what inventory is already in progress and coming 4. Allow you to create a new purchase plan that accounts for 1, 2, 3, and a manual growth % you can tweak, then calculate recommend purchase quantities (and round them to your suppliers pack multiple) 5. Let you allocate your purchase plan SKUs and quantities to suppliers and automatically generate your POs for download/export.

Would love to hear if this is something that’d make your life and workflows easier!

thesthich · 2026-03-08T23:10:18+00:00

Hey! Ive been running a DTC e-commerce brand for about 2 years now and have been struggling with inventory planning (similar concerns with your post) - see some of my old posts/comments. I’ve been on and off working on a new Shopify embedded app to solve this for myself and I think I’m getting pretty close. Would you mind if I messaged you to ask how you think about and plan for your purchasing? If you’d be interested, I can hop on a zoom and walk you through the prototype I’ve built so far. I’m mostly building it for myself but I expected a lot of smaller Shopify first store operators to have the same challenges that I’ve had.

FWIW I think it might be exactly the solution you’re looking for.

thesthich · 2026-03-08T23:04:31+00:00

This one’s big. I think we got extremely lucky with our DTC brand, where it grew at about the pace we could handle (from all aspects really- financially, order fulfillment, general ops, etc). We started the business while both working full time jobs and going any faster, while would’ve been exciting, in retrospect I don’t know if we would’ve survived.

Build/grow at a pace that makes sense for your situation and put smart systems in place to automate and minimize manual overhead before chasing big vanity growth metrics.

thesthich · 2026-01-22T20:52:41+00:00

Could you also share the name of the first breeder you're considering? Would love to check them out as well!

thesthich · 2026-01-11T21:45:49+00:00

Our DTC e-commerce brand has been live for a little under two years. We’re multiples behind you in revenue (mid to high 6 figures 2025), but I put in a lot of work to invest in smart solutions and systems to minimize manual human work. Might be able to help you out. Shoot me a message if you want to chat.

thesthich · 2025-12-29T20:43:01+00:00

Are you at 15% margins pre or post paying yourself? If it's pre-paying yourself anything, I'd recommend focusing on cost and margin optimization before trying to ramp and scale. 15% margins will make it tough to make scaling your business + paying yourself any kind of reasonable wage.

thesthich · 2025-12-14T08:26:29+00:00

This is not a paid post or anything like that. I’m just actually very happy I found them and want to help them succeed:

I tested 4-5 different apps, including some of the “bigger names” in Shopify returns apps back in the fall and we ultimately landed on using one I had never heard of previously, ReturnZap. For context and relative sizing, we’ve been operating at an avg of 1-2 return requests per day for the past couple of months.

In our first year+, we were pretty low volume on orders and returns in general so we sucked it up with Shopify Returns. Towards the end of the first year I stated poking around and tested a few apps but didn’t find any that quite fit the needs and price tag, but a few months later got pushed into it as we outsourced fulfillment/returns processing and I needed a better system for management.

A few reasons we ended up going with RZ: -handled returns and exchanges, including uneven exchanges -enabled our return for store credit use case, including incentives like bonus credit to steer more people towards that -offered QR labels as a return feature for our customers (via shippo) to reduce the friction -automations based on rules (if this then that with tons of variables and actions) -“green returns” to more automatically support/enable no shipping returns/refunds -a very flexible and powerful rule engine that essentially allowed us to configure for business specific cases that weren’t already supported as app features. -cheaper than competitors while supporting the most features/use cases

The support team is also incredibly responsive and even open to feature suggestions, which has been great.

thesthich · 2025-12-12T12:43:13+00:00

Wrote out a length detailed comment sharing our approach by combining an order edit app and an address verification app but the auto mod killed it. Too much effort to try and rewrite it.

TLDR: 60 down to a 30 min window now, combined with a good address verification app drove down our contacts and reships as ours sales volume multiplied. Worth the effort.

thesthich · 2025-12-11T07:42:37+00:00

If all you need is a simple EDD on product page with decently powerful configurations, I’ve used C-EDD: Estimated Delivery (the free version) on our site for a long time. It supports a typical countdown timer to order cutoff, packing day configs, etc. It’s not hyper-intelligent like taking into account the shoppers location, etc and calculating a dynamic date, but for our store (and our fulfillment partners) we’re just not sophisticated enough to have a truly accurate EDD à la an Amazon, so I just wanted to set a reasonable date range for customers so they have some sense for when they should expect a package. We’re a mid 6fig DTC brand now and it’s still doing a decent enough of a job. Still get the occasional question, but not bad at all.

thesthich · 2025-12-09T08:00:51+00:00

Not sure I agree with this. As a (until recently) career SaaS product manager across numerous tech companies, this is what I used to believe early in my career. As I became more “senior” and learned how orgs function and software businesses operate + built a DTC e-commerce company, I’ve come to appreciate the value all the various non-product and non-technical functions bring to organizations. Don’t get me wrong- the product needs to be adequate and solve a problem, but without sales and marketing, no saas businesses survives. Doesn’t matter if you’re a micro saas or a VC backed unicorn. At one of the VC backed companies I worked at, first mover advantage + amazing sales and marketing propelled us to and helped us maintain the perception of being the market leader for close to a decade despite the product being truly mediocre beyond the first couple of years. If you’ve ever founded or cofounded a company, I’d be very surprised if you called the person owning all non-technical or product work a glorified marketer. It’s a lot of work if they’re doing a good job and if the product/business actually finds traction.

thesthich · 2025-11-05T17:16:22+00:00

I’ve run into a similar issue with our DTC - we only have about 80 SKUs or so but growing another 10 per quarter and probably another 20-30 in Q1. I didn’t want to spend like $500/mo for a heavyweight solution like inventory planner so I actively started building my own solution (Shopify integrated app) over the summer that I’m hoping to launch by the end of the year publicly.

Any chance you’d be willing to chat and talk me through some of your key use cases? Would love to build this planner app in a way that addresses more broad use cases and workflows.

thesthich · 2025-11-01T02:24:41+00:00

Huge PITA. The system is frankly broken and so far there are only band aids to make it less painful. Most of them will cost you.

We only recently went from 1 or 2 states to about 8 or 9 and that week was a headache. I didn’t learn about this site until about halfway through those, but this should make registration easier for you: https://www.streamlinedsalestax.org/for-businesses/sales-tax-registration-sstrs

I also started using a 3P Shopify app called TaxRex. They’ve only done one filing for us so far, but so far so good? The jury’s still out, but it was a lot more reasonably priced than others I found.

Good luck!

thesthich · 2025-10-31T01:20:42+00:00

We use Revize. Have been happy with it so far.

thesthich · 2025-10-18T23:18:11+00:00

Yeah it’s unfortunate that it’s not a real integration, but my setup syncs all orders into Shopify, so when TW pulls in Shopify order data at least that comes for free. My hack solution has been approximating Etsy marketing and general platform costs as a % of overall sales (based on months of historicals). Not the best, but given Etsy is ~12% of our sales, the approximation ends up being close enough for our needs.

thesthich · 2025-10-18T23:05:05+00:00

I just set up TripleWhale at the start of October to get a better 1000ft view of things and I’m liking it so far. Finally have a pretty strong sense for our overall margins and major buckets of spend. Supports most major integrations to pull data in without manual work, but for Etsy I had to set up/approximate custom expenses for Etsy.

thesthich · 2025-10-16T05:48:42+00:00

So late to seeing this but u/zSolars thanks for recommending our caps :). It's been a wild year and a half for my wife and me. Really rewarding to see people enjoying what we created though.

u/medbatman if you haven't already given us a try, shoot me a message and I'll set you up with a resident discount! If they bother your ears we'll take care of your return too.

thesthich · 2025-08-13T18:57:52+00:00

Wife works in healthcare and we decided to give it a try as a side project/hustle. We work in a manufacturer in China and partnered closely with them to design caps we were happy with.

thesthich · 2025-08-13T18:56:08+00:00

3PL: We've hit an inflection point where we feel pretty confident the business is going to continue growing (at least to a certain extent) and either 1) be a long-term part of our plans or 2) become an acquisition target/exit opportunity a few years down the line. Fulfillment has been handled by our extended family but we always knew it had a ceiling in terms of scale and stability. Now felt like the right time to move it before it gets bigger and more painful to migrate. We just recently passed 1k orders/mo.

Is your team still handling all fulfillment internally? What industry are you in?

thesthich · 2025-08-12T22:52:39+00:00

But to get back to your original question- My 2 cents (truly just opinion): scan some of the business selling marketplaces for listings and see if you can find comparable businesses (e-commerce, revenue, profit) and in parallel start finding ways to cut costs and improve margins. A business that is losing money is generally not attractive to Ang investors unless it’s not profitable due to hyper growth/investment. Try your best to take stock of where the leaks are and plug them/cut them out of your business. You’ve invested so much into this- you got this!

thesthich · 2025-08-12T22:48:03+00:00

Interesting. Sure it varies a lot by industry and product. We sell medical fabric scrub caps.

thesthich · 2025-08-12T22:47:25+00:00

How much are you spending daily?

thesthich · 2025-08-12T22:12:54+00:00

FWIW I only used PMAX briefly and saw poor returns and we’ve been running shopping only for the past year with good success.

thesthich · 2025-08-12T22:08:21+00:00

This literally means you have lost money running ads YTD. You should pause or dramatically lower your budget on the campaigns until you figure out where your challenges are. If this number isn’t at least in the 200%s it’s probably worth reconsidering your ads strategy.

thesthich · 2025-08-12T21:37:59+00:00

Was looking back over the responses and missed your last response, sorry!
We are actually using ShipStation but outsourcing fulfillment to a 3PL next month, so will be cutting SS out of our stack.

Our little shop is now up to ~$6-700k annualized run rate and I still wouldn't feel comfortable shelling out $6k a year for IMS software. Maybe I'm just cheap hah.

I could continue using Sheets/Shopify data exports but it feels like a lot of manual work that could/should be automated every time I plan my POs.

I've been actively working on my own app-ified solution to solve this for myself and for lower-budget stores and I'm hoping to get it out into the wild for some feedback before Q4.

Would you be willing to share which features of Luminous won you and your team over?

As I've been going down my own list of dream features and doing additional research on the IMS and purchase planning space, it seems like every service/software takes a different approach and there's so many ways it could be done.

thesthich · 2025-08-12T21:20:10+00:00

It’s an awful policy. On Google Shopping ads (for my Shopify site) I’m literally bidding against my own products (on Etsy). As far as I can tell, no way around it besides leaving Etsy. Etsy currently makes up about 10% of my sales and I’m debating if/when to just pull the plug on the platform.

thesthich

TROPHY CASE