Customers of QuickBooks Commerce have really been thrown for a loop. Not only has the popular inventory order management tool been slowly taken away from customers all around the world since 2022, but it has been officially discontinued for everyone as of August 2023. This leaves many small and midsized eCommerce business owners scrambling to find a decent QB Commerce alternative. Fortunately, if you find yourself in this situation, there you can get access to all of the same features and plenty of extras by combining your existing QuickBooks plan with ConnectBooks and a quality third-party inventory and order-tracking solution.
But if you’re just now finding out about the QuickBooks Commerce sunset, you might be panicking and asking a lot of questions. For instance, when exactly does the QuickBooks Commerce sunset go into effect? Is there any way to continue accessing the product? What are the best alternatives?
Before we get into the nuts and bolts of good QB Commerce alternatives, let’s take an in-depth look at QuickBooks Commerce, what it does, why it’s needed, and how to replace it in 2023. So, let’s get started!
The rise and fall of QuickBooks Commerce was swift, which is why so many eCommerce businesses are struggling to figure out exactly what happened. In 2020, Intuit purchased TradeGecko and repackaged it into the product many business owners are familiar with today — QuickBooks Commerce.
In essence, QB Commerce is (or was) a comprehensive inventory and order management tool. It integrated with QuickBooks to give eCommerce businesses a fast and easy way to oversee virtually every part of the product journey, including manufacturing, inventory management, order processing, sales channel integrations, currency conversions, and even sales forecasting.
For many, QuickBooks Commerce was a dream come true. It helped make QuickBooks Online far more suitable to the specific needs of eCommerce sellers. Unfortunately, the dream was short-lived. Now, thousands of businesses have to figure out a way to migrate their data to a new platform or simply drop the features to which they’ve become accustomed.
Officially, the QuickBooks Commerce sunset is set for August 31st, 2023. However, the specifics of sunset are not entirely clear. There has not been a clear indication from Intuit how (or if) customers will be able to save and migrate their data to a different platform. As of this writing, Intuit has made very few official statements on the matter, and customers were only made aware of the discontinuation of the product by a banner on Intuit’s website.
To a certain degree, many QB Commerce customers have seen this sunset coming. For some, it’s not even the first time that the product has been discontinued. In 2022, Intuit officially discontinued QuickBooks Commerce for users outside of the United States. If you were a customer within the United States, you had two choices: you could either pay to upgrade to the QuickBooks Online + Commerce package, or you could take your business elsewhere.
This was the first “soft” sunset, which cut out millions of eCommerce businesses around the world. Then, in 2023, Intuit displayed a banner on its website announcing the complete sunset of the product on August 31st, 2023. This “announcement” gave businesses a relatively short period of time to consider their options and find a quality alternative for all of their inventory and order management needs.
The worst part about the discontinuation of the QBO Commerce bundle and the underlying product is that it is still very much necessary. If you run an eCommerce business, you still need most if not all of the services QuickBooks Commerce offered. Here are just a few reasons why so many business owners are upset about the change:
● Multi-Channel Inventory Management - One of the biggest advantages of QB Commerce was the ability to manage inventory across different selling channels. Without some kind of centralized system or dashboard to understand product inventory status, you’d have to spend hours every day just trying to figure out what you’ve got and what you still need.
● Real-Time Updates - As soon as a product was running low, QuickBooks Commerce would let you know and make it easier to maintain healthy inventory levels across entire product lines. This also prevented overstocking of products that haven’t been selling as well.
● Efficient Order Processing - Whether you manage 1 order or 100 orders per day, you need a system that reduces errors and enhances efficiency as much as possible. While it was around, QuickBooks Commerce actually managed this pretty well, automating the steps needed to receive, process, and fulfill orders.
● Minimized Manual Intervention - By integrating with all of the systems within QuickBooks Online, QB Commerce cut down on the need for manual data entry. This “hands-off” approach gave eCommerce business owners more time to focus on other aspects of their online stores.
● Data Analytics - With QB Commerce, you could get a plethora of reports on sales, customers, and inventory. As all of those useful reports suddenly disappear, you realize how much you depended on strategic views of your business processes and results.
● Scalable Solutions - Like most QuickBooks products, QB Commerce made it easy to scale without having to switch to a different platform or pay for endless upgrades.
As of now, the vast majority of QuickBooks Commerce alternatives cannot do everything that QB Commerce could. For instance, Shopify offers various inventory management tools, but they don’t come with the same analytics reporting or integration perks. Similar products on the market offer a few features that may be “enough” for some businesses, but will likely leave many eCommerce stores wanting for more. Fortunately, ConnectBooks offers a comprehensive solution that, with the right third-party inventory management tool, integrates with QuickBooks and stands as one of the best available alternatives to QB Commerce.
When you combine QuickBooks with ConnectBooks, you can:
● Automate your accounting processes across multiple sales channels
● Keep tabs on your inventory and get real-time updates
● Get instant reports on your sales and profits
This means that ConnectBooks offers one of the best ways to automate many of the processes that you’ve lost now that QB Commerce is discontinued. However, to get a fully eCommerce management solution that can sync with QuickBooks, you’ll still need a solution that has the same degree of inventory and order tracking capabilities as QB Commerce. Thankfully, you can still get all of this and more — if you know where to look.
While ConnectBooks can help you with some of your inventory management needs, you’ll want a more complete eCommerce management solution that you can sync with QuickBooks. Thankfully, there are a number of great options at your disposal. Some of the most popular inventory and order management products include Sellercloud, Goflow, and Shipstation, all of which can be synced to QuickBooks using ConnectBooks' one-click integration feature. This way, you can get the same features as QuickBooks Commerce, without losing your data or having to rely on manual data entry.
Do you want to learn more about the best QuickBooks Commerce alternatives? If so, reach out to the experts at ConnectBooks today!
