Brightpearl by Sage vs. Distro

Brightpearl is very well suited for small-medium companies that are growing quickly and need a way to improve their operational systems and functionality to handle increasing volume of orders. Particularly if you use multiple SKUs, sales channels, and/or warehouses, the features offered by Brightpearl are excellently well suited to handle these types of needs. I don't believe Brightpearl would be very applicable for very small companies with a small number of SKUs, as many of the features offered would be unnecessary and underutilized.

Incentivized

• Brightpearl tracks order changes and communications very well. It documents all activity in a feed that anyone can see, including status changes, notes made, emails sent, etc.
• Brightpearl makes it incredibly easy to find orders fitting certain criteria through the use of statuses that you can customize. For example, as a multichannel seller, we can easily create statuses for each channel that we sell from, where our orders will (oftentimes automatically) land in. We also deal often with things like back ordered items; we can also create statuses for certain brands, so that when we expect a shipment in from that company, our back order specialist can easily sort through her orders that are waiting on that shipment.
• Brightpearl makes it easy to take orders over the phone. Everything I need is right there on one screen; not often do I find myself needing to deviate to other tabs. The steps I take (from "new order" to finish) are straightforward and understandable, and go in steps that make sense.

Incentivized

• We have experienced many errors and have not been satisfied with the product or support.
• There were specific requirements that we had for our inventory solution. We were assured by the salesperson and sale engineer that BrightPearl would meet those requirements, but we found after the fact that it did not.
• The implementation was troubled. The Brightpearl implementer did not complete the implementation, there were many errors, and the implementation closer had to re-do many things in a rush to get us online.
• We've has serious issues with the Shopify integration from flat out service failure to inventory sync. Issues that we were told by sales would work a certain way but they do not.
• Support for picking from specific inventory location or change default inventory location rather than FIFO model.

Incentivized

Brightpearl has proved to work out for our company and we have no need or intention to let it go. Rather we intend to build on what we've accomplished and it will no doubt help us scale our business and meet our ambitions.

Incentivized

Could be easier to use on smaller screens like iPads and iPhones. The layout is odd, the PC and browser passed part is [easy to] find and very nice layout, would like them to bring out an iPhone app and they would also need Android one but as a company we wouldn't use it as we only use iOS.

Incentivized

Brightpearl is always easily accessibly anywhere that you can find an internet source. I have checked our stock levels when we have been off site at Ham Rally's at home and on my way home or to work if needs be. That is probably one of the best features of this system.

Incentivized

Brightpearl performs very well and integrates very well with our Metapak packing and despatch system. IT also intergrates very well with Amazon and we have used Ebay although there have been complications with Ebay and stock levels. We use Ebay mostly for second hand items of which we only have one so have skipped using Brighpearl for these products.

Incentivized

Brightpearl was ALWAYS great at responding to us. Their customer service was quick and responsive. Unfortunately, the responses were often that "engineers were working on it" but nothing seemed to ever come of that. I realize that Brightpearl is a large company that a lot of businesses rely on. But when you can't hit "enter" when trying to search in the front-end POS, that type of behavior should be changed very quickly and it never was. Admittedly, small things, but those annoyances tend to ultimately affect the overall experience.

Incentivized

No in house training was given.

Incentivized

The online training was very helpful in the areas we were shown and was implemented very well via a Skype call and an presentation done via the internet. However it was not thorough enough for all of our needs in certain areas. More training in person on site would have been very helpful.

Incentivized

The people handling our integration didn't try to get to know our business at all to help us integrate it. They sent us a few lists to go through for chart of accounts, had us send our inventory list over, and they uploaded those. Then we went through a bunch of trainings which to me were not very helpful. I do better figuring it out on my own. I feel like we could have done most of it ourselves with just a little coaching.

Incentivized

I certainly wouldn't select Brightpearl now. With Cloud Commerce Pro you can list directly onto all the marketplaces/website software that it has integrations for (more integrations than Brightpearl has) plus you have Google Translate Professional integrated to help you with foreign language listings. Brightpearl cannot do any of that, so not easy to expand your sales due to the limited number of marketplaces where you can sell.

Brightpearl's ability to increase or expand its capacity and retain its performance levels to accommodate growth were acceptable but not fantastic. The program was constantly making changes which can be useful, but was also confusing & hard to keep up with since we were never updated that changes were about to be made or had been made.

Incentivized

• We would not be able to trade on our 12 channels without BrightPearl. It's as simple as that.
• We use Amazon and eBay in both EU and USA and manage several virtual warehouses within BP and this works fantastically.
• Our Amazon and eBay sales increase alone is 3x the cost of Brightpearl.

Incentivized