Linnworks is order and inventory management for sellers on more than one channel. It takes in orders from every marketplace and web store you sell on and keeps stock in step across all of them. Dispatch runs from the same screens.
It’s built in the UK and has been majority-owned by Marlin Equity Partners since 2021. More than 4,000 retailers use it, going by its own count, through over 100 native integrations.
Over time, an account builds up a detailed record of every order: which channel it came from, what was in it, which warehouse sent it and which courier took it.
Connections and rules
The integrations are why sellers pick it. Reviewers rate the channel and courier connections highest, along with the onboarding team, and its Trustpilot score sits at 4.2 from about 640 reviews.
The Rules Engine gets less credit than it deserves. It makes the small calls automatically, like which courier service each order goes out with, so nobody has to make them by hand.
Building on it
There are three ways to build on Linnworks, depending on the job.
The API
The main API has around 640 operations, and a smaller, newer one sits alongside it for orders and picking. The developer docs list the permissions and rate limit for every endpoint, mostly 150 calls a minute, and the full specs are also on GitHub.
Integrations check Linnworks for new orders and stock changes on a schedule, usually every few minutes, and keep track of what they’ve already handled.
SQL, on some plans
Linnworks lets you run your own SQL queries against your data, which is the fastest way to answer a question across thousands of orders. It’s “not available for all subscription plans”, so check yours before a project depends on it.
Macros, for small jobs
For logic that has to run inside Linnworks, there are macros: small programs that run on Linnworks’s own servers, set off by a rule or a schedule. They’re designed for contained jobs, like tidying an order as it lands, and run within set time and memory limits.
Parcels and profit
We’ve built two systems that read from Linnworks and change nothing in it. The first is a Royal Mail claims system that watches tracking statuses for lost parcels and uses the Linnworks catalog to match each item to the purchase order proving its cost, even when the supplier’s SKU is different and there’s no barcode. Hundreds of pounds a month in compensation now comes back to the seller, and a claim takes about two minutes instead of 20.
The second is an order-level P&L for a retailer on three Shopify stores, Amazon, eBay and TikTok Shop. It reads each order from Linnworks and adds the costs held elsewhere, like payment fees and marketing, so orders that lost money show up the same day. If you’d like to put a number on a job like this before anything gets built, here’s the arithmetic we use.