Video Testimonial
Sellercloud together with Skustack helps us keep everything in check. Everything gets moved over where it should and moved out the appropriate way.
Inventory Manager, SEICO
SEICO
Client since: 2013
Uses: Sellercloud, Skustack
Industry: Apparel
Founded: 1952
Headquarters: Jackson, NJ
Company size: 25 employees
Type of items sold: Military style and own apparel.
“Sellercloud together with Skustack helps us keep everything in check. Everything gets moved over where it should and moved out the appropriate way.”
Zev Levine, Inventory Manager, SEICO
Before Sellercloud
SEICO (Schwarzman Export Import Co) is a family business founded in 1952 and based in Jackson, New Jersey. It specializes in military surplus items, predominantly military and military-style apparel, including its own production.
SEICO also sells backpacks, accessories, and gear for camping and outdoor activities, first aid and medical kits, survival and tactical pouches, formal and vintage military garments, and used products.
Today, much of SEICO’s business is online. “We sell on our own website, both wholesale and retail. We sell on Etsy, eBay, Amazon, and Walmart. We do a lot from our own websites,” says Levine.
The Challenge
Like many family-run businesses that have been around for decades, SEICO still did a lot of manual inventory management work. “When I started here, we were very much pen and paper, entering everything manually,” Levine tells us.
A ‘pen and paper’ approach to inventory management is enormously time-consuming and prevents companies from scaling and handling higher order volumes. It can get extremely complicated for a company like SEICO, which has thousands of SKUs across multiple companies.
Such an approach to inventory management often results in late and wrong orders, which can frustrate customers. It is also highly prone to human error, which can cause costly mistakes. Furthermore, when everything is manual, it’s harder to trace mistakes, identify where a problem occurred, and prevent it from happening again.
The Solution
Sellercloud and its products were the remedies SEICO needed for its inventory, warehousing, and shipping woes. SEICO no longer needed to rely on manual pen and paper processes. With the help of Sellercloud’s ecosystem, SEICO could begin to automate its workflows, save valuable time, reduce errors, and lower costs.
By bringing Sellercloud’s full-stack e-commerce solution into their operations, SEICO could instantly see order status and trace problems, which they could not do before.
Head of Operations and Logistics Bradley Pietz says he could now easily monitor if orders were picked and shipped. “If they weren’t shipped out, I could figure out why they weren’t shipped out through Sellercloud.” This enabled SEICO to investigate such issues and prevent them from happening again.
Levine similarly commended Skustack, Sellercloud’s WMS (Warehouse Management System), and barcode scanner app, which helps receive and pick orders, prepare shipments and process returns.
Skustack dramatically improved the accuracy of SEICO’s inventory management and warehouse operations. “Getting everything scanned in and inventory correctly – that’s where Skustack comes into play,” Levine tells us. SEICO no longer needed to manually type in every SKU—now, they only need to scan barcodes.
He was particularly pleased with how Skustack helped with bin contents. “I could see how many are in the bins at the end of the day, even after they’ve finished all their picking. And then I could even tell them, hey, something doesn’t make sense,” said Levine.
On the topic of bins, Levine also praised the support SEICO received from Sellercloud’s support team when transferring their bins to a new warehouse. “Sellercloud support helped us a lot with the transition from our old warehouse [to the] new warehouse,” he said. “Thank God they were able to be there to help us.”
Pietz also admired how everything is saved in Sellercloud’s system, making it a single point of truth for everything the company needs. Everything is searchable with keywords, making it easy to find products if a new order comes in. “Let’s say it’s a pair of gloves. I could type in a black pair of gloves and I’ll bring up all black pairs of gloves,” Pietz explains.
He also notes that saving details in a central location is particularly useful when customers claim they didn’t receive an order item. “Sellercloud also provides us with all the information on that order, along with the packing list,” he explains.
Managing all their information in one place also helped improve how SEICO works with customers and vendors. “I also create new customers or vendors for our system, POs, and orders that need to be made, which is fairly easy on Sellercloud,” said Pietz.
“Sellercloud together with Skustack helps us keep everything in check. Everything gets moved over where it should and moved out the appropriate way,” said Levine, preventing further problems and enabling SEICO to work more efficiently. “We’re able to get things a lot more automated, a lot faster to get them shipped out, especially with upgrades that Skustack has done for us,” added Levine.
After Sellercloud
Sellercloud’s ecosystem elevated SEICO’s efficiency by cutting out slow and error-prone manual work and bringing automatic processes into their workflow. “Now we are scanning things, and there is not a lot of manual typing that we have to do for thousands of SKUs that we have over multiple companies,” says Levine. SEICO can now properly handle its order volume and take its business to the next level.
It’s not just the day-to-day tasks that Sellercloud’s Skustack has helped with; the workload from heavy-duty tasks like cycle counts has also been reduced. “We can do our cycle counts on our inventory a lot faster than we did in the past,” says Levine.
However, what Levine really loves about Sellercloud is how easy it is to use. “Everything is pretty much black and white. There’s no guessing around.”
With Pietz, it’s a similar story. “I’m not a tech guru, but it’s definitely straightforward,” he says, adding, “it’s easy to get to purchase orders, it’s easy to get to regular orders, and it’s also easy to find customers.”
Pietz is adamant that Sellercloud’s ecosystem is integral to the success of SEICO. “Without Sellercloud, the daily operations would not be good here at all. They wouldn’t be flowing properly.”
Levine agrees, summarizing that Sellercloud makes his job significantly easier and enables SEICO to sell more and boost future growth.
