The four hidden costs of running stock through Cin7 Core alone.

Cin7 Core is one of the better inventory systems for SMB e-commerce. It records movement, syncs with Shopify, prints purchase orders, and runs the warehouse. We've used it at Personalised Favours for years.

But "records movement" and "tells you what to do about it" are two different things. After 18 months of operating in Cin7 Core full-time, here are the four hidden costs we kept paying — and why we eventually built our own layer on top.

1. Reorder is reactive

Cin7's low-stock alerts fire when you cross a threshold you set manually. The threshold is usually wrong. It's set once, never updated, doesn't know about lead times, doesn't know about seasonality. By the time the alert fires, you've already lost two days of sales — and the supplier you need is on a 28-day lead.

What you actually need is a forward-looking view that knows your lead times and projects when you'll cross zero, not when you've crossed an arbitrary line.

2. Seasonality is invisible

Cin7's reorder logic uses a flat trailing average. It doesn't know that you sell three times your normal volume in December. Or that Mother's Day moves 40% of your candles. Or that your Father's Day mug supplier needs 60 days, not 30, in the lead-up.

Result: you stock out on the products that matter most, in the windows that matter most. Every year, predictably.

3. Slow-movers pile up silently

Cin7 doesn't flag SKUs that haven't sold in 90 or 180 days. They sit on shelves, eating cash and warehouse space. The first time anyone notices is at the year-end stock take, when they show up as a writedown.

4. Margin is a guess

Cin7 shows you DEAR unit cost. Real margin needs landed cost: unit + labour + raw materials (where you cut from sheets) + inbound freight. Without that, you can sell loss-makers for months without realising.

We had four products at Personalised Favours that we'd been selling at a 6% loss for nine months before we caught them. That's $84,000 left on the table.

What to do about it

The four costs above are why we built Stocura. It sits on top of Cin7 Core — doesn't replace it — and gives you the layer Cin7 doesn't:

• Forward-looking reorder with seasonal-aware reorder points and one-click draft POs straight back to Cin7
• Per-SKU seasonality detection across 24 months of history, not flat averages
• Slow-mover surfacing with a decision workflow — discount, bundle, or discontinue
• True landed-cost margin that includes labour and raw materials, not just DEAR unit cost

Stocura is in beta and free during beta. If you're running Cin7 Core and any of the above sounds familiar, the first reorder queue is ready by the next morning.