Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Joel Graham Customer Support and International Operations Manager
Read full review At this point I would recommend looking elsewhere - 8 years with a platform and finally have to switch due to the unreliability is not something a business likes to do! They should sell the platform to a company that actually cares about owning an ecommerce builder. Research Shift4 - the parent
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review In my opinion, charge you too much for what it is worth In my opinion, tech support is always blaming client and end up fixing it own issues In my experience, make you believe client is important Read full review Cons Supports only a small number of marketplaces and in a limited way only. When I signed up with Brightpearl they claimed that you could list directly onto eBay from within Brightpearl but this turned out to be untrue as Brightpearl did not support eBay postage policies (eBay's semi literate way of saying shipping tables). Not only can you not list directly onto eBay, you cannot list directly from within Brightpearl to any marketplaces whatsoever. With other software you can list directly to all the marketplaces they integrate with. Brightpearl is abysmal at VAT. Brightpearl calculates VAT on Channel Islands and Canary Islands orders even though there is no Vat in either of them. So when you pay HMRC you will be paying them a bit extra unless you check all your orders which makes the software somewhat redundant. When I signed up they advertised Brightpearl as the software to automate your online selling. But it didn't really do that. A couple of years later at considerable extra cost they released an add-on app called Brightpearl Automation that does seem to deliver on automation. However other software offers that at no extra cost. Brightpearl claims that it integrates with Amazon, but this is only partially true as they have completely ignored the new marketplaces that Amazon have opened. If you list on those marketplaces you have to input the orders manually and Brightpearl will not update the stock, putting you at risk of negative feedback. Other software integrates fully with all Amazon marketplaces. Now that I am leaving it was suggested that I might benefit from read-only access so that we could easily double check things like warranty claims. They offered me a year's read-only access for £10,080 which is more than double my yearly contract for full use of the software. Now, if that isn't taking the mickey, I don't know what is!!! Read full review Page structure is all over the place. It can be difficult to find where to go to make page edits. Base platform isn't very robust and requires multiple add-ons in order to add CRM, Taxes, and other capabilities Reporting isn't very strong, necessitating outside analytics File system is also pretty wonky and feels very primitive Customer service and technical help leaves MUCH to be desired. Not as many supported add-ons/plug-ins as other platforms, and many of them cost additional fees. Many of them also don't seamlessly integrate, meaning you'll need to dev the integration yourself. In general, what you see in the WYSIWYG is not what you get. Order System is not very intuitive for the modern era Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Not applicable - as a franchisee, the franchiser took over the web site and shopping cart capabilities, so I no longer need the tool. But I would recommend it.
Read full review Usability Brightpearl can be a little confusing to begin with, there are a lot of options to look through and working out the intricacies takes some time depending on what you would like to be able to do on it and what your account is set up to do. It is however very thorough and once you can work your way around it most of the functions are fairly simple to use and very detailed.
Read full review If you are looking for ultra basic interface ...
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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.
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Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review You always manage to fins someone, but, in my experience, resolving issues are not an easy task. Why do we pay for a service , and then spend time trouble shooting constantly with them ?? In my experience, they eliminate features , send you an email what you can use instead, with instructions most people cant do without an IT guy . It feel more like an open source than a true integrated service.
Read full review In-Person Training No in house training was given.
Read full review Online Training 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating Implementation was generally perfect, but if you are coming across from Sage I personally would recommend doing this as baby steps. We tried to import our entire Sage history in one batch and that was a bad idea hence the 9/10. That was mainly our fault and nothing on Brightpearl.
Read full review Initially it was difficult to manage the UI to the client, and then hard to change anything , unless you used the boring and too generic templates . Their template selection is very limited , that are basically all the same with different background images and colours . If you are unfortunate to have been a long-time client, you will have to completely rebuild your store, because old templates are not supported anymore
Read full review Alternatives Considered Initially we went with Brightpearl because it was an all in one solution.
Salesforce CRM capabilities right out of the box far surpass Brightpearl's, but there's no inventory or accounting system pre-built in. We are currently moving away from Brightpearl for both CRM and accounting functions however.
Read full review We used them for 2 years and had minor problems up until the end. For the last 2 months, customers were unable to checkout, or connect to our payment processor. We put in like 3 to 5 hot tickets to get fixed and day after day nothing was fixed and support got ruder and ruder with us! We lost thousands of dollars online with this company and now they are chasing us for a renewal payment! Simply put, this is bad software with a poor customer care staff!
Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review Return on Investment It's really difficult to say. While everything is now in one place, we've spent a ton of time with support and figuring things out on our own. We've also had to spend a ton of money with our CPAs fixing our financials every month. However, the sales piece has streamlined our process for shipping orders out in a timely basis. Read full review We have seen an increase in sales of 440% since starting with 3D cart. We find that the 3D features of promotions, coupon codes, rewards points all make customers want to come to us or come back to us. They made mobile conversion pretty easy, and our mobile traffic went from 33% to 54%. Read full review ScreenShots