The Sunsetting of TradeGecko and the Rise of Zorelo

TradeGecko (latterly known as QuickBooks Commerce) was a successful inventory and order management system, before it was acquired and subsequently shut down. The cloud-based platform primarily managed products, stock, relationships and sales. Multiple sales channels were supported, with integrations for ecommerce platforms such as Shopify and WooCommerce. Some basic production functionality was also available for manufacturing.

More than 23,000 businesses relied on TradeGecko, so why was it discontinued? And how does this relate to Zorelo?

What TradeGecko Did Well

The core functionality, while limited, was robust and worked fairly well. The interface was clean, simple and intuitive. It was priced very reasonably for what it was.

It was cloud-based, which while common for the time, it wasn’t a given. Server performance (speed) and reliability were mostly decent.

The list of dedicated integrations was extensive, and the open API was easy to work with.

Support response times were reasonable, though they did get noticeably worse towards the end of TradeGecko’s life.

Where TradeGecko Fell Short

TradeGecko really fell short in certain areas. In fact, this is why Zorelo exists today! Zorelo was originally a web app designed to run alongside TradeGecko, to fill in the gaps and add the additional functionality that TradeGecko didn’t offer.

The functionality was limited, features present in other systems were absent, and the level of customisation was lacking. I won’t cover everything here, but I want to focus on three key areas.

Order Workflows

Like most order management systems, TradeGecko featured fixed, generic statuses for sales orders, such as ‘Draft’, ‘Open’ and ‘Shipped’. There was no way to set up custom order stages. But what if your orders follow a more complex workflow, such as stages for artwork, approvals and quality checks? Well, there was no way to reflect your workflow within TradeGecko; all of your outstanding orders would just sit under the ‘Open’ status in one big long list. It wasn’t possible to track where each order was within your workflow.

This might not be an issue if you only need to pick products from a warehouse before shipping, but for more complex workflows, it’s a huge problem. Some businesses use paperwork and physical paper trays, others use spreadsheets, and some use external systems like Trello. None of these solutions are ideal, and they all introduce their own set of problems.

This single shortcoming was the main reason why I started Zorelo. With Zorelo, you can set up custom stages for your orders to progress through, mimicking your exact workflow. You can change the way orders behave at each stage, see how long each order has been on each stage for, and at a glance, see how many orders are on each stage. Simple, but very powerful.

Artwork Management

There’s not many ERPs out there that offer good artwork management, but TradeGecko offered none. Graphical files would need to be stored and managed externally, and artwork approvals required manual emails back and forth.

Zorelo’s artwork module allows you to upload files and link artwork both to relationships and to orders. Custom fields allow you to record relevant information against artwork, such as thread count or print size. Full revision history is available, and approvals can be sent with just a click.

Production Functionality

TradeGecko’s Manufacturing module was very limited. For selling made-to-order products at scale, it wasn’t really fit for purpose, mainly due to how disconnected it was from sales.

There was no way for TradeGecko to tell your sales channels the quantity of a product that could be produced, based on the stock in hand. This meant that if you wanted to sell a made-to-order product on your website, you would need to make that product available to buy on your website, even if you don’t know whether you actually have the stock to produce that product. This is a huge problem for lots of businesses.

Then there was the manual work required. If a customer ordered a made-to-order product, someone would need to manually create a production order to produce the product. The sales order and the production order could not be linked in a meaningful way, which made the process very manual and clunky.

Zorelo on the other hand, can tell your sales channels how many of each product can be produced based on the stock in hand, preventing overselling. If enabled, production orders will be created automatically for your sales orders. Sales order pick lists will show you which products need to be produced, along with the location of the component stock required for the production.

The Sunsetting of TradeGecko

In September 2020, TradeGecko was acquired by Intuit. The sale price was reported to exceed $80 million (USD), making it one of the largest tech exits in Southeast Asia. At first, TradeGecko users were assured that the software would remain the same, just with a different name. TradeGecko became QuickBooks Commerce.

In June 2021, it was announced that QuickBooks Commerce (formerly TradeGecko) would be “sunsetting” in June 2022. In other words, Intuit were giving QuickBooks Commerce users 12 months notice before turning off the software for the vast majority of users. I say “vast majority”, because QuickBooks Commerce would in fact still be available in some form, but only for US customers, and only as part of a larger (and more expensive) package which included QuickBooks Online. So if you were outside the US, or if you didn’t use QuickBooks Online for your accounting, you were out of luck.

It seems that the strategy behind the acquisition of TradeGecko, was actually to upsell the software to their existing QuickBooks Online customers. It does seem strange to spend so much money to acquire TradeGecko, only to throw away the majority of existing customers and shut the door to any new customers outside of the US, but I’m guessing that it must have made sense to them at the time. I don’t know if the strategy paid off though, because Intuit went on to discontinue QuickBooks Commerce entirely as of August 2023.

What I didn’t know then, was that Intuit’s decision to sunset TradeGecko would have a profound impact on the course of my life.

The Rise of Zorelo

The Hard Deadline

As mentioned above, Zorelo was originally a web app designed to run alongside TradeGecko. Upon the announcement that TradeGecko would be sunset, we made the decision to further develop Zorelo into a standalone ERP system which could replace TradeGecko entirely. We weren’t just building a replacement though, we were building a bigger and more comprehensive system which wouldn’t fall short in the areas that TradeGecko did.

We had a year to do it. That’s not much time. It was hard. Very hard.

Deciding to build an entire ERP system, pretty much from scratch, with a tiny development team and only 12 months to do it… was ambitious. Delaying the launch wasn’t an option, because there were two separate businesses that needed to run on Zorelo when TradeGecko was turned off. I didn’t get much sleep during those last couple of weeks, but we just about managed to hit the deadline.

Our Initial Release

I won’t pretend that it was all plain-sailing after that. The hard deadline prevented us from doing extensive, real-world testing before the two businesses migrated over to Zorelo. There were some teething issues and some oversights. There were some features that weren’t present at launch, which needed to be prioritised straight away. The next 6 months were just as difficult and chaotic as the previous 6 months.

Honestly, I wasn’t in a good place. Burnout is a killer. But then, I got this message from Dave Dean at Print 2 Media: 

“I have to say, Zorelo has really matured and we really value it very greatly. It's already better for us than TradeGecko was and we were quite happy with TradeGecko! The recent speed improvements are the cherry on the cake. You've done an amazing job.”

That message was exactly what I needed to hear. It was a reminder of how far Zorelo had come and a confirmation that our hard work was paying off. This gave me a much more positive mindset, ready to tackle Zorelo’s next phase.

The Next Phase

We weren’t ready for our public launch yet. Zorelo was working well for the few businesses that were using it, but there was still a lot of work to be done.

Our server infrastructure and core architecture needed upgrading, to ensure that they could reliably meet the demand of rapid growth. Stock and accounting needed to be rock solid. Support systems needed to be built in. Our UI needed refreshing to keep it clean and modern.

In addition to tightening up what we already had, we added lots of new functionality. We worked with real businesses to implement features that would be of real value. Every business is different, and Zorelo needed to reflect that.

Our team expanded. I was fortunate enough to find and hire Keir Davie, an excellent developer, now our CTO. Keir heads up our development team, and his dedication and hard work have been paramount in getting us to where we are today.

Our Public Launch

Businesses have been running on Zorelo since 2022, and since then, we’ve been battle-testing and further advancing the platform. We’re now ready to open Zorelo up to the wider market.

If you’re finding that you have to resort to workarounds and manual tasks because your software doesn’t fully support your workflow, then Zorelo might be exactly what you need. Get in touch for a chat, or book a demo with us to see Zorelo in action.