SpyCameraCCTV automates to make way for innovation with Brightpearl

The background

When Lee Adams went to Hong Kong on business for another company a few years back, he stumbled across a camera when shopping at a market. He thought they were pretty cool devices so brought a dozen of them back home.

After forgetting about them for several months, he decided to clear some space and sell them on eBay. Pleasantly surprised by the return he made, he decided to find the supplier from the market in Hong Kong and try his hand at selling a few more.

Now he runs a worldwide CCTV camera business as a living and is turning over profit year-on-year, as well as expanding his garden furniture business, Alexander Francis, underneath the umbrella company Open 24 Seven. We had the chance to catch up with Lee to find out more.

The challenge

“After a bit of trial and error, I kicked off my ecommerce business by setting up my website – SpyCameraCCTV. The business started getting bigger and bigger, and after a while, it became clear that I needed something more robust supporting my business than my current software if I was going to scale this growth effectively,” Lee explains.

Lee tells us: “Before Brightpearl, we were using a concoction of Sage Line 50, Excel spreadsheets and Google Docs. We had become inefficient – Sage was too slow for us with multiple users, understanding spreadsheets became increasingly more difficult and Google Docs were in overwhelming abundance. We couldn’t expand and grow with Sage, which essentially is just an accounting package. We also had no customer management system and a complete lack of automation. This led to mispicks, double selling, a lack of communication and wasting valuable time.”

“We began to look at other systems like Sage 200 and NetSuite, which were far too expensive and just not quite right. We felt Brightpearl was the software solution that was most well-tailored towards an ecommerce business.”

Key Challenges:

• Generally inefficient and slow

• No customer management

• Mispicks and double selling were frequent occurrences

The solution

Lee says: “Brightpearl understands the challenges an ecommerce company faces and the critical importance of automation. Having orders, inventory, accounts and customer data in a single system is unbelievably helpful and reduces the time it takes for us to make business decisions. We are able to concentrate on growing the business rather than implementing and managing multiple separate systems.”

“The switchover to Brightpearl was a relatively simple process even though there were lots of products and records that needed to be transfered. The Implementation team at Brightpearl were really helpful – the processes that they set up were in place from day one and made us more efficient right from the get go. We instantly realized the benefits of Brightpearl and hit the ground running. Of course, it took a few weeks for us to get used to the system, as with any new software, but once we got to know it, it was incredibly straightforward and intuitive to use.”

Lee continues: “Brightpearl eliminates missing items from orders, we have less meetings within the business as all the data is already available in one place, and the accounts are really easy to use and in real time. Also, the in-depth reports let us make better, more informed decisions throughout the business.”

“We now have a system which interlinks our website, eBay, Amazon, warehousing and accounts. You make an update in any one of these areas and Brightpearl updates all the others automatically. There’s no more passing paper around the office and our customer service has significantly improved, which we can see clearly in the improvement of our Trustpilot reviews. We can serve our customers better, there’s no double selling, our inventory levels are always up-to-date, and we even have the time to speak to our customers just to see how they are doing.”

The future

Looking ahead to the future, Lee says: “Brightpearl is a scalable multichannel retail management tool, specifically designed for ecommerce. I expect to grow SpyCameraCCTV substantially with the help of Brightpearl. I now have the time to concentrate on other areas of the business, like finding new suppliers at lower prices and expanding operations.”

www.spycameracctv.com