Brightpearl calls itself a retail operating system: orders, stock, purchasing, warehouses and accounting for multichannel retailers and wholesalers, all in one place. It’s based in Bristol. Sage bought the rest of it for $299 million in early 2022, and it now trades as Brightpearl by Sage.
It’s a full implementation. Brightpearl’s own estimate puts the average go-live at 90 to 120 days.
What reviewers like most is seeing orders and stock from every channel in one place, and trusting the numbers. On Trustpilot it has 4.5 out of 5, from about 250 reviews.
The Automation Engine
The Automation Engine does a lot without code. A rule can allocate stock, fulfill from a fallback warehouse, raise a dropship purchase order and send the invoice, triggered by things like payment status or sales channel.
For the standard order, it’s excellent. Paid, in stock, one warehouse, standard delivery: the rule fires, the order ships, and nobody touches it.
Rules work on sales orders, and an account can have up to 60 of them, each acting on an order once. Orders that need more than that, like stock split across warehouses or a mix of dropship and shelf stock, can be handled through the API.
A shared rate limit
Brightpearl allows 200 API requests a minute per account, shared by every private integration on it. Integrations pace themselves to stay under it, and pause and retry if a request is turned away.
Brightpearl can send webhooks when goods ship, a dropship is raised, stock arrives or an order changes status. Each one carries an ID the integration uses to fetch the details, and the API reference is public.
Orders that stalled halfway
We built a fulfillment engine on Brightpearl for a music retailer with several warehouses and showrooms and dropship suppliers behind them, whose rules had been stretched until orders stalled halfway and suppliers were paid to ship stock already on a shelf. Brightpearl stayed in charge of the data. For every order, the engine now plans the best way to fill it from live stock, then works through the plan step by step, so a failed call resumes where it stopped.
Dropship orders that took around two days now process immediately, and orders needing a transfer between warehouses ship the same day. The signs that rules have reached their limit look a lot like the ones for outgrowing Zapier, and they’re worth checking before anyone writes code.