Cratejoy is an online subscription billing solution that provides clients with features such as a website builder to create a subscription store, flexible product options, customer accounts, and inventory management. In addition to the traditional subscription billing and eCommerce features, Cratejoy also provides search engine optimization, email and social media marketing, and robust diverse analytics reporting.
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Invoiced
Score 7.4 out of 10
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Invoiced in Austin offers their invoicing and AR automation platform, providing a platform for collecting online payments or presenting electronic invoices, AR analytics, and support for subscription-based business management on higher service tiers with subscription analytics (e.g. churn, pricing plan management, etc.).
I will not recommend Cratejoy to anyone I know because I had a very poor experience with them. Initially, in my research, I had contacted Cratejoy to understand their platform more. I was led to believe that selling on their 'marketplace' would allow me to take advantage of a lower selling fee. We discussed how I would set up my shop and they assured me that it was done correctly so I would pay the lower amount. It took me over a year to realize I was paying the higher fee, which is about 10 times higher than the lower one. Fees are not listed anywhere in the Cratejoy administrative panels. They are not being emailed and there is no information about them anywhere UNLESS you think to go into your payment processor and look at individual transactions. Clearly, it's my responsibility to look at these things and see why the math is not adding up. However, at the time I signed up this information was not clear and I was given incorrect answers to my questions. I was operating on an assumption that took me a long time to realize and ended up costing me thousands in fees.
A 1-10 employee company with no accounting system integration needs and no customization may be suited for Invoiced. Although I wish I could, I cannot in good faith recommend any other scenario for which Invoiced is the right solution. Perhaps a subscription service that is very streamlined on autopay could work as well, but I cannot speak to that scenario directly. I do not think Invoiced can be trusted to integrate with accounting software, certainly not NetSuite, given the aforementioned reasons. There is a very high risk of system failures, connection breaks, improper code built into the core bundles, and they will blame the company for anything that is not totally standard operations. In summary, if your business does anything unique at all from a transaction lens, I would be very careful as Invoiced may promise to handle it in a Sales pitch, and then 9 months later it could still be unsolved. All the while, they are charging you even if the product is not launched, and they also will not let you terminate, because Invoiced will deny a "breach" even in the face of a directly observable example just to ride out the contract and keep all the money.
Communication is the #1 failure - the Invoiced contract Term starts PRE-launch on day 1, yet Invoiced had an extremely slow and encumbered way of onboarding and trying to set us up.
Core Product: In our testing, their core product broke numerous times, and if this were in a live scenario we would have been devastated. Be very careful as they don't take ownership for maintaining their integrations with all software, and things can break at any moment with updates
Systems: Invoiced rolled out updates that contained faulty code and damaged our accounting system. The lack of expertise, at least in NetSuite, is very dangerous and I recommend having in-house develops watch Invoiced's moves very carefully if you do end up trying to use them.
Lack of Ownership: We tried to terminate multiple times, only be to requested over and over that they can fix the problems. We gave them more time since we were so heavily invested from a time perspective, but they did not own the failures and we were even lied to directly by senior management in a remarkable failure to adhere to basic deadlines.
Whether it be their upper management or their customer support crew, they have always acted and treated me like they care. Probably because we make them a lot of money, but nonetheless they do a great job whenever any issue comes up. I even met them in person!
We selected Invoiced primarily due to their purported high level of customizations and flexibility to handle differing business needs. That, unfortunately, became the exact reason we terminated the contract though. They have a basic framework for something that could be really great, and the potential is there, but they lack the in-house expertise and the product is far too infantile at present. Major bugs and similar issues need to be stamped out first. I can only hope they take it as a learning experience.
