Inventory app for Etsy sellers
An inventory app for Etsy sellers covers the two things a storefront cannot: where your stock physically is, and everything you own that is not a listing. Etsy tells you four linen totes remain. It cannot tell you which bin they are in, how much fabric is left to make more, or where the padded mailers went.
What your shop does not track
Storefront stock counts are built for selling, not for running a workshop. Everything below is invisible to them, and it is most of what a small maker actually manages.
- Location. A listing count never says which shelf, bin or storage unit the item is in.
- Materials. Fabric, wax, beads, blanks and timber are not listings, so nothing counts them.
- Packaging. Mailers, boxes, tissue and labels run out mid-order and appear on no report.
- Tools and equipment. Owned, needed, and entirely absent from your shop dashboard.
- Units that are not "each". Storefronts count whole items. Studios run on 3.5 m of fabric and 200 g of wax.
- Stock in more than one place. Studio, garage and a storage unit are one business but three locations.
Multi-channel makes it worse
Selling on Etsy plus your own Shopify or WooCommerce store means two systems, each confident about its own numbers and neither aware of the other. Both are counting sales. Neither is counting the roll of ribbon that both listings draw from.
The practical answer is not to make the storefronts agree with each other. It is to keep one record of what you physically own and where it is, and let the storefronts carry on counting sales.
What to look for
A seller inventory tool is worth having if it does these things.
- Tracks anything, listed or not, so materials and packaging count as inventory.
- Arbitrary units: metres, grams, rolls, sheets, not only whole items.
- Nested locations across studio, home and storage unit as one map.
- Fast capture, because a maker is not going to type a catalogue during a busy week.
- Search that answers where something is, not just how many are left.
- Export, so your records are yours if you change tools.
How Locately approaches it
Locately keeps one nested map of every room, shelf and bin across every place you store things, and treats materials, packaging and tools as inventory alongside finished stock. Quantities can be recorded in whatever unit the thing actually comes in. Capture starts with a photo of a shelf rather than a blank form.
It is deliberately not a storefront integration. Connecting shops is on the roadmap as an optional paid add-on and is not part of the beta, so nothing here depends on it. Locately is pre-launch and there is nothing to log into yet.
Common questions
Does this sync with my Etsy shop?
Can I track materials as well as finished products?
I sell on Etsy and Shopify. Does that complicate things?
Is there a free plan?
Pay once. Keep Plus forever.
Locately is pre-launch. The first 100 people pay $99 once and never pay again, refundable in full until the beta opens.
Related
Bays, aisles, racks and pallets in one nested map, on a phone. What a small warehouse needs from inventory software, and when a full WMS is overkill.
A QR code inventory system labels shelves and boxes so scanning a code shows what is inside. How it differs from barcodes, and how to label locations rather than items.
Spreadsheets are a genuinely good inventory tool until a specific point. Where that point is, what breaks first, and how to move without losing your data.