When Intuit acquired TradeGecko in August of 2020, I was hoping they would use the product's inventory and eCommerce integration functionality to enhance the lack of those capabilities within QuickBooks Online.
I was somewhat concerned that this idea was lost somewhere within Intuit when, in September of 2020, they released QuickBooks Commerce as a standalone product that was available only to new subscribers of QuickBooks Online. At the same time, Intuit permitted former TradeGecko users to continue subscribing to the standalone product under Intuit branding.
Not long after, Intuit notified TradeGecko users that they had to migrate to QuickBooks Online by June 10, 2022, and the standalone product would be turned off on that date.
Over the roughly two-and-one-half-year period between the acquisition and the demise of QuickBooks Commerce, Intuit was doing precisely what I predicted. The problem was that they implemented bits-n-pieces rather than the full functionality during that time.
Intuit also game-planned a strategy that would compel eCommerce-based businesses to migrate to the higher-priced QBO skews of Plus and Advanced to gain the same functionality within TradeGecko.
They provided all QBO users with a degree of eCommerce connectivity directly within their versions, limiting both the feature set associated with connectivity and the number of eCommerce connections.
They incorporated most of the actual 'inventory' features into QBO Plus and QBO Advanced and only incorporated some of the more significant complexities of inventory into those products in the first six months of 2024.
As I mentioned in my article, "Add some 'Style' to Your QBO Inventory with Item Variability' last November (2023), following QuickBooks Connect, Intuit was in the process of adding "Item Attributes" or "Variants" (as Intuit calls them).
The most common 'attributes' of an item are size and color. For example, you might stock and sell a sweater in XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL, 3XL, 4XL, and 5XL. That same sweater might come in five colors: White, Black, Blue, Red, and Green. That's nine sizes, five colors, or 45 variants of the same SKU. Typically, you would set this up in an inventory system as one item using a 'style grid' of all the variants.
This complexity was unlike anything available in the QuickBooks product lineup before the acquisition of TradeGecko, with a single exception: QuickBooks Desktop Point-of-sale. But apparently, the ancient coding in QBDPOS was so far apart from that associated with QBO that it made more 'economic sense' to spend $80 million to purchase TradeGecko with a much more similar coding structure to QBO.
Another critical feature to the long-term viability of QuickBooks Online for manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers… Sales Orders have emerged from incorporating TradeGecko features into QBO Plus and Advanced. The feature provides real-time tracking of committed sales that have not yet been fulfilled. Sales Orders can be imported from unlimited sales channels and will reflect their order fulfillment status.
But just as importantly, QBO Plus and Advanced users will now see these committed sales in terms of 'quantity on sales orders' and the impact of those quantities on 'the available quantity of an inventory item to sell.'
Another recent addition to QuickBooks Online's inventory functionality is the ability to take inventory counts and make adjustments from 'the count.' You can count all your inventory, a specific item, or a specific group of items. The only thing I have not seen available with this new functionality is 'inventory by location'… hopefully, that will be forthcoming.
As I predicted four-plus years ago, Intuit's acquisition of TradeGecko was a 'problem resolution' strategy. While they may have lost many TradeGecko customers when they ended the standalone product, they have gained a significant enhancement to the inventory and eCommerce functionalities for QuickBooks Online over those years.