Start here
Find out what
breaks next
Answer a short set of questions about how the operation runs today - channels, SKU count, order volume, where stock lives, what already hurts - and get a straight read on what breaks next and what stack fits.
Not a quote, and not a lead-magnet PDF. It exists because the honest answer is often that the platform is fine and something cheaper is wrong, and that is worth knowing before anyone spends money.
The questions, and why each one changes the answer
Published in advance, because a diagnostic whose questions are a secret is a sales call wearing a lab coat. Most merchants can answer all seven in about ten minutes.
1 · Which channels do you sell through?
One channel makes almost every stock problem a configuration problem. Three or more, and the question stops being about the store at all — it becomes about which system owns the truth.
2 · How many SKUs, and how deep are the variants?
Catalogue depth decides whether a migration is a build job or a data job. Variant structure decides it more than raw SKU count does.
3 · Orders per day, and what happens at peak?
The peak multiple matters more than the average. An operation running four times its normal volume for six weeks has a different ceiling from one running flat all year, and it fails at a different place.
4 · Where does stock physically live, and who says how much there is?
One location and one system is a solved problem. Two locations, or two systems that both believe they are authoritative, is the single most common root cause behind everything else on the list.
5 · What is running now — platform, ERP, WMS, connectors?
Including the spreadsheets and the manual steps, which are systems whether or not anyone calls them that, and which are usually where the real process lives.
6 · What hurts today, in the order it hurts?
The ranked list from the person living with it is better diagnostic data than anything that can be measured from outside.
7 · What has to be true in eighteen months?
A new territory, a wholesale arm, a third the headcount per order. The trajectory decides whether today's ceiling is worth raising or worth leaving alone.
What comes back
A short written read, in plain language. It names specific systems where the answer points at one, and it says when the evidence is not strong enough to name one. It is a document rather than a call, so it can be forwarded to whoever else has to agree.
It is not a proposal and carries no pricing for our own work. Those are separate on purpose — a diagnostic that concludes by quoting itself is a sales document, and this needs to be usable by a merchant who goes elsewhere.
Three things, in writing
- What breaks next, and roughly at what volume
- The options ranked by cost against how long each one buys
- What would need to be true for each to be the right call
What it costs, and what happens to your answers
It costs nothing, and there is no obligation attached to it. It takes about ten minutes to answer and the read comes back in writing.
Your answers are used to write your read and nothing else. They are not sold, not shared with a vendor, and not used to put anyone on a mailing list. There is no drip sequence behind this page. If the conclusion is that there is nothing to do, that is the end of the correspondence unless you start it again.
And the recommendation is often to do nothing. An operation whose stock problem is a reservation setting, whose picking bottleneck is a pick path, or whose platform is genuinely fine for another two years, gets told that. Those answers cost this practice a project and are the reason the ones that do proceed are worth taking — a diagnostic that always concludes "you need a migration" is not a diagnostic.
Start the diagnostic
Answer what you can of the seven above — rough figures are fine, and anything you are unsure of is itself a useful answer. The read comes back in writing.