Fishbowl Reviews

I've been using Fishbowl now for a year, and it has made a big difference in business operation. Whenever I run into problems their support team is right on it to help me. Very easy to intergrate with my online store and other selling sites.

Inventory syncing with Amazon, Ebay and Shopify makes our life easier. ORder processing in Fishbowl is another winner. Great for the price...

We purchased inventory software from Fishbowl and then had an exceptionally difficult time implementing the software. We paid for a number of items that we have not received months later, went weeks without receiving responses from them during the implementation process, and were verbally promised things that they have walked back or denied entirely. Worst of all, because of their lack of responsiveness, they claim that we are not eligible for a refund on the software because we are past the time limit for the satisfaction guarantee. Integrations, services, implementation support, and custom reports were paid for and never received. The server has been down for long time periods (days at a time), credit card systems won't integrate properly and the software crashes regularly on our machines.

Rather than try to do what is right and work things through, they have opted to take a hard line on this issue with no flexibility at all. We are now currently pursuing legal action. If you are considering using their products or services I would recommend in the strongest of language possible to not do any business with this company.

The customer service Fishbowl provides has been a great experience. They understand our process and go out their way to give us the help we need.

I love the ease of analyzing each piece of our manufacturing process.

I have been using and loving Fishbowl for the past 5 years. In the past 12 -18 months the technical support has plummeted. I believe the took on new ownership and since then they have made phone support useless. As I write this I have been on hold for over 45 minutes. They give you the option to leave your number but I have yet to receive a call back from them. Really sad to see what has happened to what was a great organization

Since our business depends on inventory movement of over 4,000 items, it has helped tremendously in time, effort & accuracy.

We have been using Fishbowl Inventory since 2011 and while it has been quite an eventful journey we have seen definite improvements over the years in stability and ease of use.

North Park is a 3rd Party Logistics and Contract Packaging business, specializing in light manufacturing, warehousing, and B2C shipping services. We provide each customer the service and attention only the 'big guys' get at other fulfillment houses.

Our search for a new Inventory/Manufacturing software solution was prompted by our move away from a warehouse operation towards a 3rd party solution for small to medium-sized businesses, that are outgrowing their current warehousing capabilities.

Prior to using Fishbowl Inventory, we used 'MS Dynamics AX' (think 'GP' on steroids). Our management team has had decades of experience using everything from BaAn and SAP to high-end custom systems, and even home-grown customized solutions.

We chose Fishbowl Inventory primarily based on value, integration w/Quickbooks, and ease-of-use.

We've been running for more than 3 years, currently running ver 13.2 Manufacturing, Salespoint and Mobile Warehouse. We highly recommend staying updated with the current version, as improvements and features are continually being added.

Initial install and implementation took us less than a full day, including import of Customer, Item, BOM, etc. from QB. User training took a week or so for all our team to be up and running well enough to use it in live production. (Only one of us spent any time in the demo.)

For the most part, Fishbowl is simple and intuitive to use. There are very few places or processes where the desired next step isn't obvious. However, we've found many useful tips & tricks that we benefit from greatly, and most would have been learned with onsite training, but we declined initially because of our extensive background with other systems.

Customer support has been absolutely fantastic for us! We use the Live Chat option as first contact, and only rarely need to resort to phone calls. Despite the recorded phone tree that is standard today, Fishbowl's is about as short as it can be and still direct your call to the right group. Once there, it's always leave a message and wait for a call-back; but I've always gotten a call within 2 hours (usually less). For truly urgent needs, I've always been able to call back, get the operator and get in touch with Support that can at least identify the issue and suggest some troubleshooting I can do while awaiting Technical help.

In 3 years we've only had 1 instance of down-time due to system failure and that was resolved and we were up and running in 2hrs.

Biggest benefits of using Fishbowl for us are ease of implementation and use; power/reliability of the system; manufacturing capabilities (only shortcoming there is full MRP/CRP/ERP modules for planning, but for our size and complexity it does surpisingly well).

The biggest shortfall of Fishbowl for us is Reporting. The nature of our business doesn't lend itself well to many of the standard informational reports (operational reports are fine). However, Fishbowl is ODBC compliant, their reporting platform is open source (similar to Crystal Reports, but a bit steeper learning curve), and if you're not comfortable with SQL there are several 3rd party options for customizing reports.

We've been successfully using Fishbowl now for at least five years and it's allowed our company to process orders and control our inventory to a point where everything runs smoothly between our manufacturing team and our front of house team. Fishbowl has helped turned our "mom and pop" business into a streamlined operation with customers all over the world.

The software overall is extremely outdated. I would not recommend this to anyone.

If you are considering Fishbowl for your business, you will be making a wise choice. Let me tell you a little about our business, what we were using before Fishbowl, and why we decided to go with them instead of the many choices you will have.

We are a manufactures rep agency servicing the HVAC and plumbing industry. We work directly with the wholesale market and warehouse about 750 - 1000 sku's. Before Fishbowl, we had no inventory program in place - other than notebooks and getting up to check the shelf. As our business continued to grow, we quickly realized the need for some sort of help in managing our inventory and purchasing. In the 2 + years since full line integration, we are very satisfied with our decision and continue to find tools and reports that we didn't even know exisited. It's a very complete system.

Our decision to go with Fishbowl wasn't an easy one. There are a lot of programs out there that will do the same thing Fishbowl can and at stagering range of costs. We looked at over a half a dozen systems, ranging from the 6 figure programs to the custom coded excel based from the local starving student. The decision was made based on the following facts - Fishbowl works directly with Quickbooks, our current accounting program. It works with excel which makes updating prices and importing product lines very easy. The other deciding factor was their support and training.

Training was a huge concern for all of our associates. Since most of us had only been working out of notebooks or memory of inventory levels for years, and with varying levels of comfort with any computer program, going to any inventory software program was a very scary thought. We made the decision to invest into the on-site training they offered and it was the best decision we could have made. There is a learning curve, no doubt about it and it can be steep depending your level of comfort and savy with a computer. But rest assured, the support and training got us the answers and assistance we needed.

The only thing I could say about Fishbowl in a negative light, is it's a little bit of a "one size fits all" program. There are some feature/functions that in our business just aren't needed. However, as a growing small business we like the idea of having tools at our disposal even if they are left in the tool box. It's nice to know we have them.

We are very happy with Fishbowl. It has helped us grow our warehouse business and find loose ends in sales, stocking levels, and purchasing practices which all means at the end of the day we have become more profitable because of it. The more time we put behind us the more valuable the data has become. We are now even doing credit card transactions right out of Fishbowl!

Trust Fishbowl. They will be there for you, provide an inventory program that will work and help you grow the business.

It provided a decent ERP for the price but is definitely geared to low transaction volumes.

I work for a full-service dental laboratory, which is a bit of a unique application for this software, and we have been using Fishbowl for about one year. Since our completed products are all custom made to patient specifications, we purchased Fishbowl primarily to organize and track internal inventory and consumption. We knew from the start that there would be no off-the-shelf solution for our situation, but we hoped that from what we had seen, we would be able to find enough work-arounds to get it doing close to what we needed.

If anything, it has made the inventory management process even more arduous. While Fishbowl offers a lot of options, and will probably work very well for a more typical business, it is not a good solution for more complex situations. It simply doesn't have the flexibility. The only way to remove items from inventory is via cycle count (which leaves no record of consumption) or via sales order (which means that all of your Parts also need to be listed as Products, and you will need to do a lot of unnecessary paperwork just to maintain accurate consumption reports.

The barcode scanners and label printer we ordered from Fishbowl are also antiquated devices, and we are unlikely to be able to repair them if anything goes wrong.

What has been most disappointing about this system by far is the customer support. The live chat feature is their saving grace - the hours are very reasonable and the queue has generally been quite short. However, there seems to be a massive amount of turnover in the company - nearly every time I contact them, I end up talking to someone different, and have to re-explain all of our problems and our situation before I can get to the issue at hand. The communication at their level also seems insufficient (on multiple occasions, I have gotten different several different answers from different people) and the quality of training for their agents seems to be low as well. Poor grammar and spelling from live chat agents, inability to answer basic questions or provide further support in lieu of an immediate answer, and an often bored tone of voice over the phone.

Overall, Fishbowl has been complicated, difficult to use and has caused more problems than it has solved. We still feel like we're in a transition phase and will hopefully reap more benefits long term, but a warning to other businesses with a lot of internal consumption or other unique features - make sure you get a very thorough demo and vocalize exactly what you need from the system. Further, bring someone in for on-site training if you do intend to purchase this software.

It replaced a very old and unreliable product. By integrating with QuickBooks, we greatly expanded the candidate pool for our accounting department. We were able to grow our business with lower growth in staff.

We currently use Fishbowl to manage our inventory, process payments, and manage customer accounts. We are looking to expand and utilize many other integrations for web store and asset tracking capabilities.

We have been working with fishbowl for well over 2 years now. We have had tons of issues from slow performance, to the software just crashing, to upgrades not working right. The most recent upgrade made it so every thing we did took 4 mins to respond. Fishbowl took about 4 hours just to get back to us because the customer service is the worst ever. Then they blamed it on us and our environment until I told them to take our file and try it on their end. They then said there was a bug with the software. They took awhile to figure it out and promised us an update later that night. After being at work late with others trying to get through our work there was still no update. I called the next morning (about 20 times) with no answer. When I got someone to call me back (after emailing some vp with threat of legal action) they said the update was up the night before (lies as I had checked at least 15 times). Then I was told they were not answering the phone because they were having a party to celebrate the patch which "fixed" our issue. After we got it updated the issues was better but still there. The patch also broke our ODBC connection which we needed to do just to integrate because they claim it works with quickbooks but really doesn't. Then we had to spend more money on redoing a custom report that no longer worked. The list goes on and on with all the other problems we have had and workarounds we have created. We are a growing company and inquired about new users. Beware after the initial purchase any new users will cost you about 2k each. I have never seen such horrible customer support and such a badly designed piece of software. They do one thing well and that is sell you a bunch of lies until your in to deep and just say we are going with it and maybe it will get better. Please Please do yourself a favor and find something else. Even if you pay 5 times as much for a custom inventory program in the long run you will save. The loss of money and time spent fighting this crappy software is unreal. Oh and the compensation they offered for us being down a day and half was 2 hours of training which we haven't even gone through our initial training package because the staff has no clue how to use their product. I knew more after playing around with it for 5mins than our training did and we paid for him to fly out and do an in house training.

This company use to be good, now the software crashes constantly including Fishbowl anywhere, they want us to pay for hosting and constantly pay for services. In the past, it was working fine but now is just completely useless, don't waste your money and find something better. Once Fishbowl didn't export properly, good luck with your quickbook data as it will throw all your accounting off.

Excellent

Fishbowl has been outstanding for our business special with to manage stock and inventory it helps us to have a better management better stock control, we are happy with our experience with Fishbowl.

Fishbowl is a good, solid warehouse management system. It has all the functionality needed to manage our inventory and warehouse (over 1500 bin locations and 5000 sku's in a 25,000sq ft whse) . Customer support is always helpful and friendly.

We have used Fishbowl in our corporate warehouse for over 5 years. Fishbowl makes processing both eCommerce and wholesale orders easy and organized. It also makes purchasing inventory a breeze with in depth historical reporting and sales forecasting. I would also highly recommend investing in the Janam handheld scanner running Fishbowl mobile software; makes cycle counts hassle-free. There is a slight learning curve, but is still much easier than other inventory systems we've used in the past.