How Settle leveraged Trackstar’s API to launch a new inventory management product
Company Background
Settle, a fintech company, helps e-commerce brands manage, order, and pay for inventory. Through its platform, Settle enables brands to keep their two most important assets - cash and inventory - in balance.
Challenge
Settle started as a payments platform supporting e-commerce brands with managing payment workflows and financing inventory purchases. However, in conversations with customers, Settle's team discovered an overarching problem: brands have difficulty managing inventory across multiple warehouses, and struggle with knowing when to place purchase orders to ensure in-stock inventory meets demand. Settle realized that to fully address their customers’ needs, they needed to build inventory management functionality.
Settle explored different options to get inventory data. Direct connections with QBO, NetSuite, and accounting software weren’t ideal because Settle’s customers did not treat these systems as a source of truth for inventory. Data via Shopify wasn’t always accurate as brands manually updated or intentionally altered their Shopify inventory levels.
Settle came to realize that they needed to integrate with warehouse management systems (‘WMS’), the source of truth for inventory. However, the sprawl of the WMS landscape and unique technical requirements of these systems results in an integration lift requiring extensive resources, years of time, and expertise.
One of the foundational pillars of our end-to-end back-office platform for Consumer brands is accurate, real-time inventory data," noted Asher Smith-Rose, Product Manager at Settle. "Getting reliable access to inventory data was a challenging task when we looked at building integrations into the fragmented ecosystem of warehouse management systems.
Solution
To overcome these integration challenges, Settle partnered with Trackstar. Trackstar's flagship product is a universal API for warehouse management systems, providing a one-to-many integration layer on top of 50+ WMS. Connecting to Trackstar’s API enabled Settle to quickly build an inventory management module without allocating extensive engineering resources to individual WMS integrations.
The decision to work with Trackstar was easy. They’ve built an incredibly robust product, provide white-glove support, and are the only solution with a universal connection” said Smith-Rose, underscoring the value of Trackstar’s platform.
From there, Settle was able to build the integration into Trackstar within a week.
Results
With Trackstar, Settle accelerated its product development and quickly expanded its inventory management offerings. Using Trackstar delivered measurable benefits for Settle including:
Accelerated Product Launch
Settle launched their new inventory management product in just four months by leveraging Trackstar's pre-existing WMS integrations. Working with Trackstar has accelerated Settle’s roadmap vaulting Settle’s WMS coverage ahead of many legacy competitors.
Enhanced Market Position
Trackstar's comprehensive integration library expanded Settle’s total addressable market. According to Smith-Rose, Trackstar’s WMS integrations gave their sales team assurance that Settle could confidently reach new customers.
Engineering Cost Savings
By leveraging Trackstar, Settle was able to allocate significant engineering resources to their core product that would have otherwise been spent on building WMS integrations. Settle estimates they would have used 1/3rd of their backend engineers on integrations with markedly fewer WMS integrations ultimately being built if not for Trackstar.
Efficient Customer Onboarding
By allowing Settle to ingest inventory data seamlessly from customer systems, Trackstar helped transform a previously manual customer onboarding process into a near-instant data transfer. "That migration loop has been cut down to almost seconds with a Trackstar connection," Smith-Rose said.
Revenue Growth
The new inventory management product enabled Settle to expand their product offerings and provide innovative features for their customers. Inventory management is a complex problem, and Settle’s solution provides significant value to customers, accelerating Settle’s revenue growth.
Key Takeways
Trackstar's universal API enabled Settle to gain a competitive edge in product development, pricing, and market positioning. As Smith-Rose reflected,
Trackstar is doing for inventory what Plaid did for banking. If you want to be in the inventory space, you should use Trackstar because they are accelerating at a rapid rate.
By partnering with Trackstar, Settle quickly gained the technical support and resources necessary to deliver a robust inventory management product, solidifying its position as a leader in its industry.
