Brightpearl have launched the Brightpearl App Store to allow their retailer customers to access integrations from third party software solutions simply and easily as and when then need them.
Brightpearl users can now extend Brightpearl functionality adding exact capabilities they need with apps including web stores, forecasting tools, reporting tools. The Brightpearl App Store already seeing adoption by developers with 23 apps already available and many more are already in development. All approved apps are listed on Brightpearl and are available to customers directly through their Brightpearl account.
I must say I like this approach, too many multichannel management providers either have gaps in their solutions or possibly make a hefty charge for development costs to tailor their solution for your needs. Now with Brightpearl developers can fill in any missing pieces to the multichannel solution and you can choose the apps you need and add them as you grow your business.
Sometimes this might be as simply as adding your OSCommerce website orders into your multichannel management flow. For some it could be the ability to fulfil their orders through Brightpearl using Fulfilment by Amazon rather than shipping the product from the inventory held in your own warehouse or using Metapack to simplify shipments.
As an example Graham Harrison, operations director at Audio Visual Commodity, says: “Through the Brightpearl App Store I am now talking to a company in New Zealand about forecasting, a business in Germany about reporting and a French team about our pricing”.
You can find out more about Brightpearl’s multichannel retail management system or app store on their website. If only all multichannel management solutions had app stores…
2 Responses
The appstore is a welcome addition BUT Brightpearl is good at handling stock over the different marketplaces and automating sales order processing but that’s where the good stuff ends.
Many people, myself included, signed up to Brightpearl based on promises that developing a multi-currency system was a high priority. It has been a feature requested by users for 4 and a quarter years and nothing has been done. Now its been put on the backburner indefinitely. Your Euro and other foreign currency transactions are deposited, together with your local currency transactions, into one account. All currencies mixed up in a huge jumble within one account which you’re expected to waste your valuable time unraveling.
Brightpearl also boasts the ability to list directly from within Brightpearl on eBay, but, unless you only sell products which are under 2kg and can ship Royal Mail, this feature is effectively disabled because you can’t access eBay’s shipping tables, so you can’t set shipping surcharges for UK regions, or set shipping costs for overseas (because you’d have to set one rate for all of the EU, with the exception of France, Germany and Ireland, one rate for the rest of Europe, etc. So you get a customer buys from Cyprus and you’re expected to use the same rate as you would for Belgium even though the cost to Cyprus is about 4 or 5 times higher than it is to Belgium. A company that spends time developing a feature like this but then effectively disables it doesn’t inspire much confidence.