Expandly Reviews 9

Using the Expandly Expansion portal for an International Expansion - really easy and simple handling of adding new e-commerce marketplaces to my business and then to manage all the inventory listings. Also pretty cool collection of data for taxes

As an ecommerce seller, managing the multiple aspects of my business has been a real struggle. I have tried many different systems in the past and after a while they all come up short or become way to costly to use. That was until I discovered Expandly after a friends recommendation. Using Expandly day to day has made such a difference and taken so much stress away and made it easier to manage.

The only area that I felt let down by, by Expandly was the UI. It was a bit old feeling and had some issues here and there but it always worked and it is something I could deal with. But since they launched the new portal and improved all the UI, it has become super user-friendly and everything that once annoyed me as been fixed and works really well.

The system Itself seamlessly integrates with multiple sales channels that I sell on like eBay, Amazon, Etsy and Shopify. Allowing me to manage everything from one centralized place and not have to spend time logging into each website separately. The real-time stock update is a lifesaver, ensuring that I never run into the issue of overselling. It automatically updates my inventory across all platforms, saving me hours of manual work and preventing costly mistakes.

The order processing has also become a breeze. Expandly consolidates orders from various channels and automates the fulfillment process, which has significantly reduced my processing time. Expandly pulls in my orders and based on some order logic I setup with the help of the support team, and it automatically applies a shipping label to the order and all I need to do is print it off in the morning.

The support team at Expandly deserves a special mention. Whenever I had questions or needed assistance, they were prompt, knowledgeable, and always eager to help. Their commitment to customer satisfaction is evident and greatly appreciated.

Overall, Expandly has been a game-changer for me. It has not only saves me time and streamline my processes but also allowed me to focus more on growth and customer engagement. I highly recommend Expandly to anyone out their who is a ecommerce seller looking to save time or grow their business.

Good things first: The service is quite good, you always get fast answers and the team gives its best to solve your problem.

Now the downside.

I've been working in ecommerce for more than 10 years now, and I've sold on different channels like Amazon, etsy, ebay and Woocommerce on the European market, with 8.000-10.000 orders per month. We used Expandly for the last 1.5 years in North America and I want to share some insights about the tool that might be important for other cross channel sellers.

SHIPPING FUNCTION:
Expandly offers an integrated shipping function. If you have like 1-10 orders you ship per day, this might work for you. If you ship more than that, it's very time consuming, because you have to add the dimensions for EACH package individually! No possibility to save certain box sizes and reuse them or map orders by weight to certain boxes. Every time you have to insert the width, height and depth of your parcel. I would love to see our European team during Christmas business, where we ship 600 parcels a day, adding the dimensions for every single order... NOT EFFECTIVE!

REFUNDS:
If you have orders that are cancelled outside of Expandly after 12h of being placed, you have to mark them manually as cancelled or refunded in Expandly. Say you have an Amazon FBA order that is cancelled or refunded after 3 days by Amazon because the customer returned the product, this WILL NOT IMPORT into Expandly. That means, at the end of each day or week or month you have to go through all your cancelled or refunded orders in your marketplace (same for etsy, Woocommerce, ebay etc.) and mark them manually as cancelled in Expandly! Every. Single. Cancellation. Otherwise Expandly will not mirror your true sales numbers, and neither will your connected accounting tool like Quick books or Xero! Again, if you have 1-10 orders a day, that might be ok. If you sell more, make sure you hire someone to fix things up in Expandly.

UPDATE PRODUCT LISTINGS:
Expandly offers pushing your product listings to different sales channels. If you have products with one or two paragraphs and no text formats, this might work for you. If you have subheadings, bullet points, bold text... well, this will not be pushed to your sales channels. And if you accidentally push the listings from Expandly to your channel, everything will be overwritten, and you loose all your formatting. I found myself twice editing every single freaking product on three sales channels (!!!), just because Expandly pushed plain unformatted text, and additional information that are not in Expandly got deleted. Like the bullet points in Amazon, or the tons of additional requested information from Amazon - you can't edit them in Expandly, so if you push your listing to Amazon, all the information you have added in hours of work in Amazon directly will get deleted. So make sure you dare never ever push any listing to any sales channel (unless you have a "This is a green cotton t-shirt" description).

REPORTS:
You wanna know how much you sold June last year? Or last year in total? Not happening. You can't give the reports a custom date. This is such a fundamental thing, I can't believe a tool that mentions its "reports" in marketing doesn't offer it. For us, the reports offered from Expandly were completely useless. However, you could hire somebody that exports a CSV and converts that to nice graphs in Excel.

PUSH INFORMATION TO XERO (accounting software):
This was actually the only thing we ended up using Expandly for, because all the other functions did not work for us. However, I had to make sure I manually import all orders again every end of the month, because sometimes some orders were just not imported. And I also had to manually check every end of the month if all orders were send to Xero, because there were also a couple of them that weren't sent. I ended up having an entry in my calendar on the 1st of every month that reminded my to manually check if Expandly worked correctly the last month. This is not what I expect from a tool that costs this much money and is supposed to make my work easier!

SEND ORDERS TO AMAZON FBA:
Expandly offers to send orders from other channels to Amazon FBA. What a great function, in theory. But unfortunately it seems this only works when you have FBA setup in one single country/marketplace only. Once you have two marketplaces or more, Amazon wants to know from which FBA stock it needs to ship. And that's not supported by Expandly. The team made it a feature request when I adressed the issue. But nothing happened.

Overall, Expandly doesn't solve any real problems from an ecommerce business perspective, it's not making your work easier and it doesn't save you time. At least if your business has a certain size.

Always excellent and prompt response from Toni, having to put up with my basic questions, They have walked me through things step by step.

We've been using Expandly for a while now to collate orders from four different sales channels and it has made the order processing system much faster, giving us more time to focus on other business priorities. Not only are they quick to respond with any queries, they are also great with considering requests for additional features to make the process even faster and then delivering on those too! We have a named contact person in customer service and if I could influence the organisation, I think she should get an employee of the month award - you know who I mean right? (Toni)! I strongly recommend Expandly to help manage your business order and inventory processes.

I have only just started using them but all problems I have had they have assisted with very quickly and very politely, excellent customer service, especially Toni

Expandly is a very useful Inventory Management Tool and the support desk is very prompt and extremely helpful

I am using Expandly for a good few months now and I am not really happy. It is good for inventory levels and keeping all your orders in one place. Your creating listings on Amazon is very limited to the sins already existing on Amazon.If you want to add a new product to amazon which is not already in Amazon catalogue it will not be possible to do it via Expandly.
If you want to add products to eBay and test be prepared on the countless list of errors before you succeed. Your product description will be sent as a block text unless you edit it in each platform tab manually- and trust me it takes a lot of time.
I had originally pulled my stock from Amazon with an idea to list it to other platforms smoothly and save time. In the final result, I had to edit everything on eBay and test including pictures, which are pulled in very low resolution and then stretched. I suspect that every similar platform has its flaws but I feel like I was misinformed as in my eyes it not does what it says. Especially annoying low-res pictures.
If I one I am not able to list new products on Amazon I wouldn't use this app.

So easy - my chosen provider.

A few bugs to begin with but they were so helpful to fix them.

Does everything required plus more for a fraction of the competitions prices.