Glew

Glew is a highly flexible and scalable business intelligence and analytics platform that seeks to be your one source of truth on all of your data across platforms, channels, advertising, inventory, shipping, subscription, etc.

With over 100 integrations and still growing quickly, it's very easy to see profit, revenue, or Lifetime Value by channel, by segment, or really any other way you may want to slice and dice it. You have a nearly unlimited amount of dashboards and reports that you can make to get at any data that you have properly connected to Glew.

At the Plus level and higher, their team helps map all of your data points to ensure data is coming in correctly, and you can create your own manual queries and custom coding.

They have a cost manager feature which can more easily help you manage your cost of goods sold (COGS) for all products. This is very important because you want to be properly reporting on your margins and profit within Glew.

Glew has robust inventory reporting and analytics, enough so that in certain cases, you may be able to do away with any tool you may be using that predicts out of stock and re-order times. Now, they don't create purchase orders, so there is a limitation, but they can track purchase orders and help you understand when products are going out of stock, and when you should be sending those invoices. If you have an overly complex supply chain, you may not be able to do this with just Glew, but they can replace quite a bit.

Analytics tools help you find all sorts of insights in your data, so all metrics can be influenced, with the 3 main ones being: Profit, Lifetime Value, and Revenue. With profit really being the one that Glew helps with the most.

There are many others such as increasing retention, loyalty point usage, reviews, merchandising, success from channels or SMS or email, etc.

Setup depends on the number of integrations and custom integration/mapping work you need to get up and running.

Also, the larger your historical data, the longer it will take to bring it all in via API and get it organized.

Glew, and all business intelligence tools really, are more valuable as your store grows and as you have more data to analyze. Getting detailed analytics on 10 orders will not give you a lot of insights, but if you're getting 10,000 orders a month, there are clearly some nuggets hidden within the data - things like finding out your highest lifetime value channels, or which products lead to longer retention, or which Google shopping campaigns are more likely to lead to subscriptions.

Typically you want to be doing at least $1mm in revenue to start really investing in your analytics tool, that said, some brands that are smaller and either high-growth, or have a lot of historical data, could invest early and start to see strong insights and take action on them. I think this is especially true for subscription brands that want to understand retention by cohort and other subscription/loyalty, subscription/referral, or other interesting insights on their customers.

You should not use Glew if you have no customers, just started your store, or if you don't have product-market fit. While there are some insights that can help you find product-market fit, it's likely also doable by hand at the early stages and, in my opinion, that keeps you more engaged with the customers and the business, as opposed to having thousands of customers and really needing a tool to automatically slice and dice for you.

Also, the more SKUs you have, and the more orders you have, the more value you will see out of Glew. One SKU pass-through businesses with something like a 4 step sales funnel and no loyalty program probably don't need a solution like this.