Craftybase Reviews

I love this software because the developers understand how a small manufacturing business works. They don't load you down with confusing features - just what you need when you need it. It has helped me get completely organized with raw materials, track all production, determine pricing and just basically keep everything straight. If you're a maker and you're not using it, you need to be.

I sometimes feel the software tries to be all things to all people. I really don't see why the accounting aspects are necessary and feel they are sometimes lacking.

Excellent, reliable software
Highly detailed
Integrates with my Shopify store
Powerful even at lower subscription level

Sometimes not intuitive; it's not their fault that I am new to all of this.

Sales integration and inventory are the biggest winners. Put some thought into and setup the SKU's correctly across your channels and a majority of the paperwork is taken care of for you. That's worth hours after each event. If you have relatively static items building a recipe for manufacturing inventory is almost as easy. Once those are seeded correctly it's just a minute to record that you made X number of an item. COGS is updated, stocks are updated and expenses are tracked.

Learning curve was moderately steep. This wasn't unexpected as my day job is in setting up production systems so I have an idea of the complexity that is needed. Expect to spend a moderate amount of time building and then probably heavily modifying what you setup that you thought was correct. You just don't know what you don't know until you start using it and realizing how it actually goes together as an entire system.Depending on your business type some shortcuts might be needed. We do jewelry sales and a variety of categories needed to be combined for our sanity. If I tracked each and every bead, gem or finding that we used we would have nearly 2,000 unique entries in the materials tab. As an example in our case some additional thought and planning had to be devised to combine all the generic ear hook styles together and build them as a trackable unit in grams. This would be repeated for the several hundred bead styles we use. Glass, gemstone, crystal, wood, 4mm, 6mm, 8mm, 10mm etc. We aren't trying to track the 10's of thousands of beads we inventory so they are categorized by price points and then inventoried and tracked by weight.These aren't quite con's just a reality of having moved into an inventory system after a year of not having a proper one and the width of material options that we had. A business that sold soap might only have a couple dozen oil options, some jars and wicks to track. This would be much easier to directly track specific items.

We love the ease of use with Craftybase. We have a ton of items that we sell indiviually as ingredients, as well as combined to make other products on our shelves. Craftybase allows us to build these "components" as well keeping track of each individual ingredient. This is by far the most accurate and easiest way we've found to keep track of inventory, and recipes.

There is a bit of a learning curve when first starting out, but that is mostly because we had to learn the terms that Craftybase uses, and the functionality behind some of the features. There are tons of good walk-throughs in the system, as well as good examples. Customer service isn't the most reachable. If you have a question, it may take a day to hear back, and they only have email. There is no live chat, or phone support. There's no onboarding calls or dedicated support staff to really help you hit the ground running, so you'll have to spend some time really learning the system, and try and send questions that you don't need immediate answers to.

It is affordable for start ups compare to the bigger systems like trunk and gets the job done.

I hate the integration with the sales channels as it is very limited. I have been waiting for them to integrate with bigcommerce for 2 years now and their integration with square is horrible because it doesn’t bring in the items purchased and customer details. Instead it comes as a custom order and so it does pull from the inventory which means I have to delete the imported sales and re - enter it so it reduces the inventory. Time consuming.

-automatically imports orders from multiple channels
-automatically creates manufactures for products and decreases material stock levels
-keeps track of all my expenses
-provides tons of various reports to help during tax time
-customer service is easy to reach and always helpful

There's nothing I don't like about craftybase!

I can enter all my materials (in my case: various beads, wire, packaging materials, etc) and even set "recipes" for popular items so that when someone purchases an item, I can "Manufacture" it in the software and my materials are automatically deducted according to the recipe I set. I then get warnings anytime a specific material runs low. It's literally hands-off inventory management!

It's a LOT of data to input in the beginning. The time invested up front is well worth it though!

I really like that Craftybase integrates with multiple sales channels that I use. This, along with auto-manufacturing makes it easy for items to be adjusted as I sell, and I can have an accurate real-time look at all the materials I have on hand.

I found the process of getting Craftybase up and running very labor intensive - especially having over 200+ SKUs. I wish there was an easier bulk editing feature. It feels really clunky at times and there is a lot of clicking in and out of different pages in order to get each product set up - even after using the upload csv feature.

I like the reports the most. it helps to to see how your product is moving

the time consuming part I need like a week to set up and just to learn everything and manage take hours of my day and I get behind because it is hard to stay on top of everything

I love that you can set up everything to auto-manufacture so you don't have to go in and manually do it after every sale. It's pretty much on auto-pilot which saves a TON of time. It's also great that if you have two Etsy shops that still only counts as one Sales Channel.

I wish it didn't automatically import everything on the next import after you sign up. It would have been very helpful to just be able to import a little bit at a time to make sure everything is set up and functioning properly.

There is a pretty big learning curve, but only because it is dealing with SO MUCH information. Auto manufacture is amazing, but a lot of us don't keep everything we need on hand. If I have to order something and don't have it when the auto manufacture happens, everything is calculated incorrectly. If we could set the auto-manufacture to happen x days after the sale (or x days before it ships), it would help a ton, and I wouldn't have to go back in and manually change everything.

Also on the auto-manufacturing, say I run out of product stickers. And I manufacture 100 items before I buy more. It's just a small thing, so I just don't include the stickers in those 100 orders. But when I do buy more stickers, the 100 items I already made (but didn't include stickers) still count against my total. It screws up everything and I have to manually go back and change the manufacture for each sale. It would be nice if we could set it up somehow so if we're out of something, and we still manufacture the item, it doesn't count against the inventory of that item since it wasn't used.

I know that sounds like a lot of stuff, but it's really just little things here and there. The program is amazing and really does a ton of work for you.

It's absolutely perfect for my needs of running a small jewelry business. It keeps track of my supply inventory and how each material relates to finished products, to customer sales and production of those finished products. It's cloud based, which means I can check my orders and inventory from anywhere, and each section is intuitively linked to other sections, making it the only software I need to fully track my inventory and orders.

Nothing, honestly. It does everything I wanted it to, and intuitively.

We used to use spreadsheets to keep track of our inventory and raw materials until I discovered CraftyBase. It was one of the best investments we've made. Software is super easy to use, provides many tools and features to keep track of not only inventory and materials but also orders, different locations where our products are sold. It's all-in-one type of software that any business should have.

Ability to sync to regular Amazon inventory/order system.

Easy to set up and use. They are always adding new features and listening to what the users want. And their customer support is fantastic! They personally reply, very quickly, to any questions or issues.

A little clunky in some parts -- too many steps sometimes to get a task done. But, again, I feel they are addressing this and adding more streamlined functionality.