Brightpearl by Sage vs. Folloze

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

I have been using Folloze for a long time, and I will recommend Folloze because of the app's user-friendly interface and responsiveness to customer feedback. It also enhances security with SSO, two-factor authentication, and a personalization tool. Overall, there are more pros, and it increases productivity.

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

• Plug into Salesforce. We live in Salesforce, so it's a must!
• Ease of use when designing boards. We love to all feel like graphic designers.
• Dashboards showing activity levels of all types.
• Storing assets within folloze. Makes it super easy to build a board fast.
• Cloning boards. Time saver!!

Incentivized

• 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!!!

• Integrating the contact form with our CRM has been a lengthy and on-going process
• We use iframe for some of our content pieces and I think it could look better than it does now
• We need licenses for our salespeople for them to get access to insights of a board. An easier way to send them this info without them needing licenses would be nice

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

Without Folloze, the marketing team would not be able to pivot as quickly as we do to support sellers with deal acceleration and drive executive engagement.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Its great to be able to customize and build experiences without having to depend web developers or larger content teams. Using Folloze doesn't require a web developer or complicated coding language. Its quite intuitive and easy to figure out after building an experience or two. If you are stuck their support and training materials are quite helpful, as is their support team. Although the tool is great, it would be great to see even more customization possibilities. Also the reporting interface is pretty cumbersome and would benefit from added functionality.

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

sometimes its not loading pages proper, sometimes some functions are not working within or you need a long time to find out image sizes etc

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

pages load slow sometimes

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

Great support overall, which is quick to answer any concerns or questions. They're punctual and precise with their responses. I've been very pleased overall. I know if I have a concern or worry that I'll get a response the same day or the day after. Nothing negative comes to mind.

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

5 as we did it with our own people in house and not with Folloze

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I was not involved with the implementation of Folloze. This project was executed before I was hired

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Folloze has proven to absolutely stand head and shoulders above its competitors. Folloze actually integrates nicely with 6Sense or Demandbase to pull data from a CRM. Folloze seemed to have a simpler interface, and that was key when it came to enabling our sales org to use Folloze alongside Marketing.

Incentivized

cannot disclose

Incentivized

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

there are still a lot of things that need to be made available within the product

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• A sales were able to give valuable presentations which aided in earning key accounts in O&G & utility industries.
• A sales exec was able to close a million-dollar sale that she had been working on closing for a year. This board was a great visual to the customer, which helped in closing.

Incentivized