Multichannel Inventory: What Breaks When Shopify, Amazon, And TikTok Stop Talking

Steve Hutt
Well, welcome back to eCommerce Fastlane. I’m your host, Steve Hutt. Today’s conversation is all about the difference between selling on multiple channels and having those channels connected. If you’re selling on Shopify, Amazon, or wholesale, building and kitting your own products, or somewhere in the middle—and you’re still using spreadsheets or manually keying in orders—this episode is for you.

My guest today is Ben Hussey, co-CEO of Katana Cloud Inventory. Katana runs inventory and production for more than 1,500 product businesses across 70 countries. Every month, it sees hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of orders placed with suppliers. I think that gives Ben a live read on what’s happening inside small product brands, often before it shows up everywhere else. He gets to see a lot of things.

Steve Hutt
By the end of today’s episode, I hope you understand what separates a connected operation from what I joke about on this show a lot: there’s a lot of duct tape going on for a lot of brands, and team members come and go. That’s what we’re trying to figure out.

We’re also going to talk a little bit about AI agents and how they can interact with live inventory today, because that’s an interesting hot topic.

The nice thing about today’s episode is that it really doesn’t matter where you’re at. If you’re in the early stages of your product business and doing maybe $1 million in revenue, or you’re doing $10 million or more, everybody is feeling the strain of connecting different systems together. Ben, welcome to eCommerce Fastlane.

Ben Hussey
Thank you, Steve. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Steve Hutt
My pleasure. Let’s start with some backstory. I think that’s always a smart thing to do. You spent more than a decade in enterprise commerce and order management before Katana. What surprised you most once you started working with smaller product brands instead of on the enterprise commerce side?

Ben Hussey
One of the biggest things is that the core concepts and challenges are fundamentally the same. At the end of the day, every business is trying to get its product to market. With product businesses, they’re trying to make sure they’re matching demand and supply.

Whether you’re a big company or a small company, you’re trying to do the same thing: What do I have to sell? How much do I have? Who am I selling it to?

Larger enterprises obviously have more complexity, and we’ll talk a bit about complexity today, I’m sure, based on your introduction. Complexity is what makes it difficult, and increasing complexity makes it harder. But the fundamental problem and question for any product business is: What do I have? Where is it? Who am I going to sell it to?

Steve Hutt
Right. What’s interesting is that, when I did some research, you use the word multichannel, which is common. But there is also this idea of connected multichannel, and they are definitely two completely different businesses, so to speak.

What does the disconnected version actually look like day to day? That leads us into the next question about what Katana does.

Ben Hussey
I loved your introduction and the duct-tape analogy, because that’s fundamentally the problem.

What often happens is that smaller merchants start to get bigger. Maybe they find a niche, have a product line, or create their own product, and it starts to become more popular. Perhaps they start on Shopify, and it’s great. You can get online with Shopify fairly inexpensively, whether you’re reselling or making products yourself.

Then they say, “Okay, I’m on Shopify, but I’d like more revenue, so I’m going to start selling on Amazon.” Or perhaps they’re going to start selling wholesale. That’s where multichannel starts to come in: selling in more than one place.

The complexity starts to add up, and it becomes exponential. You have orders coming in from Shopify and orders coming in from Amazon. In real time, what inventory do you need? What stock do you need to support both channels so that, when a customer places an order, you can fulfill it?

We often refer to that as what’s available to sell or available to promise. When you have more than one channel, it gets much harder to do that counting, especially because ecommerce orders are happening in real time. You need a very good handle on those orders and what’s being requested of you. Then, on the other side, do you have enough inventory to support it, or do you have too much inventory?

That’s where the challenge comes in. When we talk about multichannel and connected multichannel, we’re saying that, at the core, you need a single source of truth that understands the full picture: What do I have in stock, and where is it? Where am I getting my orders from, and how do I match those things up?

That way, the business is never in a situation where it’s overselling—meaning it has more orders than it can meet—or it sells out of everything. In a way, that’s a good problem, but then you’re leaving money on the table.

That’s fundamentally the challenge and opportunity with connected multichannel: making sure all those things are talking to each other in real time and that you have a single source of truth you can rely on.

Steve Hutt
Yeah, that’s amazing. I’ve been doing some interviews lately with brands that are really starting to scale on TikTok. They find that TikTok Shop, especially for Gen Z buyers, is generating significant revenue. Shopify has also aligned itself so an order can happen through TikTok and then move into Shopify.

What do you see on your end? Is that still part of the same multichannel world where you have Amazon, Shopify, and wholesale, but you’re also doing social selling? Do all these pieces still fit together?

I can see some brands saying their Shopify store doesn’t do as well as their TikTok Shop because of the baked-in audience already on TikTok. They’re okay with that, but there’s still a fulfillment nightmare if they’re not forecasting and doing things correctly.

Ben Hussey
Yeah. TikTok and the social space make it even harder because, depending on your product, the variability in orders can be quite dramatic. One day you might have a handful of orders, but you do a certain post or video and suddenly that generates a massive influx of orders.

That’s great, but you have to fulfill it. You have to support it. You’re hoping that whatever promotion, campaign, post, or other thing you’re doing will generate business. Particularly if you’re scaling up, you might not know that in advance, and you might not be operationally able to handle it. The last thing you want to do is disappoint customers.

Steve Hutt
Right.

Ben Hussey
You don’t want to get it wrong. You mentioned forecasting, and that’s one of the things we help people with. Because we have that data, we can look back in time and say, “What should you reasonably expect and predict?” Then, what types of things and what levels of stock should you be ordering?

We’re also launching new capabilities that will help predict the future and even allow us to order on your behalf to keep you at the right stock level.

Steve Hutt
Wow, that’s absolutely amazing. Forecasting is definitely a challenge.

It reminds me of a story. There was a brand I managed when I was at Shopify. One of its challenges was that an influencer promoted a certain product. This wasn’t on social—well, it was out there on Instagram. It was one of their top-selling SKUs, and there was a business relationship based on conversions.

The challenge was that, because of their size and the product blowing up, it was three months for delivery from China. This was for a special lighted makeup mirror.

Steve Hutt
The company eventually had to close because it couldn’t fulfill its orders and went into a negative downward spiral. They really didn’t plan for that.

That could be an outlier case, I’m not sure. But it’s interesting: if you see velocity building, or early-stage influencers are starting to promote your flagship SKU, what are you doing to make sure you understand the lead time? Are you okay with lower margin and having it air freighted in instead of coming by ship?

I don’t know if you’ve seen these kinds of stories cross your desk.

Ben Hussey
Definitely. The other angle to that, which is very much related and certainly in the news right now, is tariffs. They can change overnight, as we’ve seen. I’ve also talked about the Strait of Hormuz and some other areas. Either way, the supply chain is under a lot of stress.

Whether that’s for negative reasons or positive reasons—you’re doing so well in sales—it inevitably becomes the challenge: How do I have the right things?

One thing I always advise people to do is consider optionality. You used to have a situation where you’d have one supplier for something, they were trusted, and you had volume, so you’d get your best pricing. Consider having multiple suppliers for the same product. That optionality gives you some freedom and flexibility.

To your point, Steve, it might be that you lose a bit of margin, but that’s a much better scenario than not being able to fulfill the order and potentially getting into that downward spiral.

Ben Hussey
With what we do, we see a lot of companies making a big shift over the last couple of years. In Katana, you can manage your suppliers, create purchase orders, and manage multiple suppliers. You can see how much they charge, tariff rates, and everything broken out.

That allows the business to be more intentional in its plans and say, “This might be my primary supplier. If things get really big or there’s a problem, I can immediately switch to Plan B, C, or D without taking the time to figure that out.”

That readiness element has become more and more important, with people building better flexibility into their operations. To do that, accurate, up-to-date data becomes really important.

Steve Hutt
It’s interesting. I found that your connections to a lot of different integrations and partners seem to be a core piece of the platform.

A lot of times, especially when I was at Shopify, I would recommend a certain platform and product people, engineering, or even marketing would push back right away. They would say, “Okay, wait a second. We have certain pieces of technology that we have to have, and they’re mission-critical for our business—not just Shopify, but other connections.”

Knowing that, what’s Katana’s thought process around integrations with the existing technology a brand is going to have? Do these connections truly talk to each other and make intelligent decisions because they have access to those data points?

Ben Hussey
Yeah, it’s a really interesting trend. As you pointed out, I’ve been doing this for a while and have seen some of these trends. When ecommerce first kicked off and became a thing, I was early and part of some of those trends.

What we’ve seen over the last few years is that the cost of good technology has come down.

Steve Hutt
Right.

Ben Hussey
It’s also become specialized. Shopify is obviously fantastic at ecommerce. You have QuickBooks for accounting and Katana for inventory.

That allows a small business to do a couple of things. It lets them buy best-in-class software. They can decide that the best thing to do a particular job is a specific solution, so they need that.

What that means is you’re not taking a best-in-suite technology approach. You’re not going to go to the well-known platforms like NetSuite or SAP. Of course, a small business isn’t going to do that anyway, but that type of setup is a jack of all trades and master of none.

For small businesses specializing in a niche—selling specialty protein powder, bars, clothing, or something else—you need exactly the software you need to do that job well.

Ben Hussey
We’ve seen an explosion in this type of approach, and it works when those systems can talk to each other.

Steve Hutt
Right.

Ben Hussey
We spend a very large amount of time and money on integrations to make sure, for example, that Shopify and Katana talk to each other in real time. Things like exception handling and exception rules are all managed in the integration.

That allows the business to create its technology ecosystem. Take Katana, Shopify, and QuickBooks. With those three, a business can run its entire operation. There may be other things around the edge, such as TikTok Shop, but the core functions of knowing what I have, selling it, and accounting for it exist in that stack.

The integration is done for you, so a small business doesn’t need a technical team or an IT team to do this, run it, or put it together. We’re doing it for you. That makes these really good technologies much more approachable and feasible for small businesses to set up.

Steve Hutt
Yeah, it’s amazing. The other thing I wanted to touch on was the 3PL connection. The Katana platform can be used by people with their own warehouse who do their own pick, pack, and ship. They also have the technology around connected marketplaces and other pieces of tech.

But it’s also for people who don’t fulfill their own orders and use ShipBob, ShipHero, or other 3PLs. Is it a reasonable connection for someone to be a Katana customer while having an external 3PL do the actual fulfillment?

Ben Hussey
I’m chuckling a bit, Steve, because 3PL integrations are quite challenging. But yes. The big one everyone knows, of course, is Amazon. Fulfilled by Amazon and Fulfilled by Merchant are both massive integrations, and they’re quite challenging. We have them both, and they’re great. We’ve also got a number of other 3PLs, and we’re launching, I think, 120 more over the next month and a half or so.

Steve Hutt
Wow.

Ben Hussey
What that speaks to is that we absolutely have customers who make and fulfill their own products from their own warehouse. We have customers that buy products from China—using your earlier mirror example—bring them to their warehouse, and fulfill from there.

We also have customers that are pure-play dropship or 3PL businesses. They’re buying products, getting them sent to a 3PL, and the 3PL handles everything for them. Fantastic.

What we see more and more, particularly with medium-sized businesses, is the hybrid business model. Someone starts scaling up, and suddenly they have many product lines and lots of different SKUs. One of those product lines might be the original one they make themselves.

Ben Hussey
That’s great—they’re fulfilling from their warehouse. But the new product line might be something they’re doing through a 3PL. They’re buying it in, or perhaps they’ve gone down a co-manufacturing route. They’re paying someone else to make it and get it shipped to a 3PL. Perhaps they’re then sending their other core products to the 3PL as well as fulfilling from their own warehouse.

When we talked at the beginning about multichannel complexity from a sales standpoint, what you’re asking about is the same complexity, but now on the supply side. That goes back to: What product do I have, and where?

That’s not just about finished products. It’s also about raw materials.

Steve Hutt
Yeah.

Ben Hussey
Or different things you’re repackaging and putting together into kits, for example. More and more, we’re seeing hybrid and diverse models combining all these different ways of doing things.

Going back to your earlier question about where we come in, imagine trying to manage that at scale. Even at five SKUs, your head is going to start to hurt. Excel is not going to be able to do that. How do you do 1,000 orders a month when you’ve got that type of setup?

Unless you have something like Katana to do it for you, it’s going to be very difficult. That’s why we see so many customers coming to us for it.

Steve Hutt
So interesting. I also think about the supplement market or consumables. I found it interesting with lot and bin numbers and the first-in, first-out approach.

Does Katana manage all of that too? That’s a very important concept if there’s a recall on a certain lot number and you need to know where the bin is located for that SKU, how to pull it, or how many units from that lot you actually have. Are you that granular, and can that assist a warehouse in running its lots, bins, and fulfillment process?

Ben Hussey
The short answer is yes. The slightly longer answer is that lots of people probably don’t appreciate how much the regulatory environment and other things can play into it in the background.

We absolutely have batch tracking so people can manage recalls. It can get complicated. You might have multiple products, and one is recalled, but perhaps the ingredient exists in many other products as well. That’s actually why it’s been recalled. Your recall now covers several products.

All of that complexity is managed in what we call our traceability application, which exists in our warehouse management system.

Ben Hussey
We also have warehouse management capability that allows you to know what products—whether finished goods or raw materials—exist in which bins or storage areas. Of course, that goes all the way up to the warehouse level, but it can be very granular.

Fundamentally, when we started out, we focused on manufacturers. People often knew us in the past as being really strong with manufacturers. It allows those types of businesses to go from buying and sourcing raw materials all the way through to the sale, giving you full cost of goods sold because labor and everything is tracked in Katana, and all the product is in Katana.

Then, to your point, if there’s a recall, batch issue, or anything else you need to manage—particularly in food and beverage, but not only there—electronics is another big area where this happens. Pulling all that together in one place is something we’ve done for a number of years.

As I say, it has expanded, and some of those capabilities and approaches apply even in co-manufacturing. If you’ve got co-manufacturing and need to do a recall and determine what product is affected, it gets even harder because it’s not your own warehouse.

Steve Hutt
Right.

Ben Hussey
That’s all something we manage in the product as well.

Steve Hutt
Amazing. I did some research before recording and noticed on LinkedIn that there was a post about Katana’s MCP, which is Model Context Protocol. This seems like the connection, or connected tissue, between Claude and ChatGPT and getting access to Katana data.

Can you talk a little about that connection? It seems interesting to use your chatbot of choice, query your data, and get answers. Every business is unique, but imagine getting access to all Katana data to make intelligent decisions about inventory, fulfillment, or whatever else.

I’m curious whether you can share some details about the early adopters of this MCP.

Ben Hussey
Yeah, it’s actually been a wild journey. I mean that in a really positive way, to see some of what our customers have done.

We have lots of early adopters and some early-access customers that we do a lot of work with on the product. We made a very intentional choice to ensure that Katana is open, adaptable, and intelligent. Those are three concepts we build into the product.

MCP is all about that openness. Whether it’s the user interface of Katana itself—we’re launching our own in-product version of Katana Intelligence—or whether you use Claude or ChatGPT, we’ve done all the lifting on that MCP connection, so it’s almost a one-click setup.

Ben Hussey
It’s been fascinating to watch what people can do. It can be anything from creating your own dashboard in Claude that pulls all the data from Katana, all the way through to helping you think. That’s where the intelligence comes in.

Whether it’s Claude or our own version, you can ask basic questions: What’s my most profitable product? Which product am I most at risk of going out of stock on in a month? You can even get into scheduling because we track hours. There are all kinds of things.

The thing that’s been really wild for me to see is that there are problems people don’t know they have, or didn’t know they could solve, that are now coming up. People are saying, “Wow, I want to increase all my prices by 10%. I’ll just put that into Claude, and it will go ahead and do that for us in Katana.”

Steve Hutt
Right.

Ben Hussey
Or the more sophisticated version is: “What would happen if I increased all my prices by 10%? What would that do to my margin? What would that do to my COGS? What would that do to my profit? Which suppliers are my best suppliers?”

Along the same principle, with automatic replenishment, we can assess a particular SKU. We’re able to forecast, but we can also give you a recommended safety stock. Your supplier may say they always deliver everything within one week, but history tells us it’s two weeks. That means your lead time is actually X, so your safety stock should be Y.

Steve Hutt
Right.

Ben Hussey
That’s not something most business owners are going to think about doing. But with MCP allowing Claude access, and with our own capability, these are all things businesses can do now. This is new. It’s stuff that just wasn’t possible 12 months ago.

Steve Hutt
It’s amazing. I also see this AI replenishment option that’s available. Is that part of the MCP connection, or is this something baked into the Katana platform?

Ben Hussey
It’s native to Katana.

Steve Hutt
Wow.

Ben Hussey
Yeah, it’s native. We can take history and future demand. Our CPO and founder was talking to a customer the other day who uses it. He said he doesn’t even know if the customer logs into Katana anymore. He might log in, but he uses replenishment and doesn’t make the replenishment decisions himself now.

He set it up because you can prompt it.

Steve Hutt
Right.

Ben Hussey
You can tell it to be more conservative or more aggressive. You can tell it that you’ve got a big TikTok campaign coming up in a month’s time and expect a 50% lift, or that it’s Black Friday, and it will factor all that into your demand forecast.

Then it will actually create, if you want it to—you can obviously do it yourself—the manufacturing order for your team to build, if that’s what you’re doing, or the purchase order to buy that stock. You can automate that entire process within Katana, so you can be hands-off with demand forecasting and purchasing if you want to.

We have people doing that now, which is fantastic.

Steve Hutt
It’s amazing. It is a crawl, walk, run approach, though. I think some people just aren’t quite ready for all of this. But it’s nice that the platform can do what it needs to do on its own, while those who are a little more medium to advanced have that capability at their fingertips.

Even if you just learn how to prompt by asking questions, getting the data connected, and then slowly prompting it to see what things might be possible using natural language, it’s so interesting.

I even speak into my microphone now. I don’t type as much as I used to. I’m using WhisperFlow, and it seems much more efficient. I think I can speak 150 words a minute, while I can type 30 or 40.

One question I have is that there are so many people listening to this podcast who have different levels of complexity and maturity. Their GMV, or the size of their business, is different. Some people are doing $500,000 a year and running two channels: Shopify and Amazon. Others may be doing $8 million or $10 million and running five different channels.

Steve Hutt
Can you talk about the early-stage segment? How are those people using the Katana platform in a crawl, walk, run scenario? Is it valuable for an early-stage brand that has product-market fit, is doing half a million dollars a year, and is self-fulfilling? Is there a use case for Katana for them? Then we’ll pivot over to the mid-market in the $8 million to $10 million range.

Ben Hussey
Absolutely. As soon as you get more than one channel, the complexity becomes really difficult to manage.

I’d position it back and ask that business owner: Katana starts at $300 a month.

Steve Hutt
Right.

Ben Hussey
If you’re in New York, that’s a dinner out. At $300 a month, we’re an inventory-management, ERP-style setup that can do all of that for you: manage stock levels, manage inventory, reconcile orders, and do all those things.

Even if you’re a half-million-dollar business a year, we have a free plan. People can go sign up, test it, and use it.

Steve Hutt
Yeah.

Ben Hussey
From there, as I say, it’s $299 a month. Even if your use case is relatively straightforward—perhaps you just have two channels and one warehouse—it can still bring a lot of value because it comes down to time savings. Do you want to spend every Friday afternoon going into Excel and doing the math? It usually goes wrong.

Steve Hutt
Yeah.

Ben Hussey
Or is it worth it? As a business owner, it might just be you and someone who helps part-time. I’d argue that, in some respects, it’s even more important for those folks because it’s not someone’s full-time job to manage inventory yet.

How do you become more efficient? How do you amplify what you do? It’s through tools that you can do that.

Steve Hutt
Right. And then, obviously, the mid-market. I think we’ve shared that there is clearly value there. It comes back to the duct-tape issue. Team members come and go, and there are a lot of different point solutions and systems out there, with apps being added.

I always loved doing app audits when I got on a new account at Shopify. I would ask, “Why are you using that app that costs $499 a month?” The answer might be, “The inventory person needs that because it helps with forecasting.” Then you start going through all these different things.

Steve Hutt
You’re like, “No, no, no. There’s actually a better way,” right?

Ben Hussey
Yeah, absolutely. We’re really good at inventory. It’s what we do, along with everything in and around inventory. We’re not going to go into ecommerce or pretend that we do ecommerce. Others do that.

I think some mid-market companies can get into the situation of needing so many different apps to do things.

Steve Hutt
Right.

Ben Hussey
But I would argue that within each software category, you want the best version in that category because it will do all those things for you. Then you don’t need three or four different applications.

I was just thinking when you were talking about MCP: we have a customer in Australia doing very large volume, in the many tens of millions in revenue. Their purchasing person spends 90% of his day in Katana.

Steve Hutt
Really?

Ben Hussey
Because his full-time job is purchasing. He’s in our purchasing module, and that’s what he does all day, every day.

Interestingly, they’ve also built a bunch of apps in Claude for things like portals for their customers to order from. They’re starting to build their own things on top of Katana to meet their unique use cases.

I think the key is that you have the underlying, real-time single source of truth that you can then use in different ways to run the business.

Steve Hutt
Right. What I find interesting is the connection, because I talk about the simplicity side of it. If you’re a Shopify-powered business, there is a Shopify app available. You can literally go to the Shopify App Store and type Katana—K-A-T-A-N-A. I believe Katana Cloud Inventory is the actual label.

Can you quickly walk us through what people can expect? When you download and install this app, what’s going on in the background? Is there handholding?

I’m curious about the next steps once it’s installed. There’s clearly a free option, and then with the paid option, you can get a customer-success team member to help configure and think about best use cases. I’d like to walk people through what happens once someone installs the app, how they start using it with some of the basic features, and how they can learn as they go by activating more things from within Katana.

Ben Hussey
Yeah, absolutely. People can go through the Shopify store, QuickBooks, and others, or they can go straight to our website.

Starting with Katana is really easy. You basically just need your email address. You enter it, create an account, and that creates the free account. When you first sign in, we ask a couple of questions to help get people set up. For example, do you use Shopify?

We also have an AI import tool. If you’ve got your data in any format, say Excel, just upload the file and we’ll figure it out for you. The tool figures out where to put things in Katana, and then we have a guide that shows you where those things are and a checklist that says, “You haven’t connected your accounting platform yet,” or whatever it is based on the questions you answer.

Ben Hussey
We right-size the help you need based on those questions. You can subscribe online through self-serve, but most people have questions. You can talk to our sales team and get more information. We can do demos and look at your specific use cases, particularly with large customers. They often have questions about how it works for them.

We’ve released a lot of ways of doing things now where we can customize the platform experience for you.

Steve Hutt
Right.

Ben Hussey
All of that comes from our implementation team. We have solution engineers who look at your setup and help you get it set up. That’s something you can pay for. You can also do it yourself. We have customers who set themselves up successfully without our help and get up and running.

But lots of people want help, and our team can certainly help. That can range from guided onboarding, where we’re there to answer questions, all the way through to us doing a lot of the work for you.

Ben Hussey
Either way, regardless of how you approach it, we’ve always got real-time support. We also have a customer-success team for some of our larger customers to help with strategy and other things.

What we’ve found is that people who engage with us and get our help are more successful. Inventory can be scary for people.

Steve Hutt
Yeah.

Ben Hussey
Just to give a bit of an idea, when we get people set up and help them get running, customers who start using Katana reduce their order-processing time by about 25% in the first six months.

Steve Hutt
Wow. That’s real money.

Ben Hussey
Real money. Sales orders increase by about 5% year over year. Their average sales growth, volume weighted, is about 40%.

We’ve got customers who are doubling their sales orders and revenue. We have a customer who got up and running and found $40,000 worth of inventory they didn’t know they had. Another saved 30 hours of Excel work every week.

It’s all real money. We always work with customers to make sure they get the value from it, get set up correctly, and receive help with integrations, processes, or whatever else is needed to make sure they’re getting the best from it.

Steve Hutt
That’s amazing. For those listening, I want to throw out a couple of next steps, then I can throw it back to you, Ben, for your offer and next steps.

I noticed on the website there is a playbook that came out about the cost of invisible stockouts in the AI era. You have this report, and it looks like you’ve got data from about 375 real businesses. You’ve measured a lot of things about the overall cost challenges of stockouts.

I think the education component is one thing you guys are quite good at. I went to your blog and saw a lot of great case studies from brands you’ve worked with. But when I saw this report and playbook, I thought it was pretty interesting.

Steve Hutt
I’m definitely going to put it in the show notes because I think people need this information. I think it’s a good way of introducing the Katana brand to people who have never heard of it, but who now understand, I hope from this podcast, the problem—or problems—that you’re solving.

Can you quickly talk about what this report is about? Then we’ll talk about next steps and how people can get access to everything.

Ben Hussey
Yeah, for sure. We know one of the hardest things about inventory, as I said, is that it can be scary. It’s taking the first step and understanding what this gets me.

We take a lot of time—and thank you, Steve, for taking the time yourself to have a look—to help guide people on what the business case is, where this will help them, and how it will help them. That’s what the report is all about: showing what you can achieve by making an investment in Katana, and how it pays off.

Ben Hussey
Along with that, we have information, and our team can help with the question, “How do I move from where I am today—let’s say Excel—to being up and running on Katana?” How do I make that change? Change management is usually a big concern.

We have a lot of information about that, both on the website and through our team. One of the biggest pieces of advice I always give or get asked about is that the number one thing is to start.

Ben Hussey
You know the old analogy: problems don’t get better with age.

Steve Hutt
What’s the other one? Analysis paralysis?

Ben Hussey
Yeah, analysis paralysis. Problems aren’t like fine wine. They’re all versions of the same thing: this is going to get harder for you, not easier, particularly if you’re a growing business.

Complexity won’t diminish. The longer you leave it, the harder it’s going to get. So the best thing is to start. Obviously, we’d love to see your listeners become Katana customers.

Steve Hutt
Right.

Ben Hussey
But at the end of the day, start, do the research, and use sources like we’ve got. You can talk to vendors like us, of course, and I’m sure people will talk to others as well. See the differences, and we can help people understand them.

The last thing we want is for a customer to join us when it’s a bad fit. We want to make sure we help people make good choices. Then, as I say, we help you get up and running.

We’re big on education. There are lots of resources, and we offer a free trial primarily so people can get educated, try it out, and see what questions it sparks. We have a whole knowledge base available as well.

We talked about the openness of the platform, and that applies to us as a company too.

Steve Hutt
Yeah, I love it. It’s katanamrp.com, K-A-T-A-N-A-M-R-P.com. I’ll make sure I put that in the show notes. I’ll also include a link to the Shopify app, where you can download it, and a link to this guide.

I’m writing these down while we were talking. I downloaded the PDF and skimmed through it before recording today. I thought, “You know what? I think I need to write about this particular piece of content.” I’m going to link to it, but I think I’m also going to do a blog post about it because there are some really good data points in there, and I have my own framework for writing. I’m in the midst of that, so hopefully we’ll get that out into the wild too.

Steve Hutt
But yeah, Ben, thank you so much for coming on the show. I’m on page two of notes. Life of learning is my mantra.

I know for a fact you guys are solving some unique challenges beyond Shopify core itself.

Ben Hussey
Yeah.

Steve Hutt
You integrate nicely with partners. I love the fact that you’re in the AI era now with your MCP. I think there are a lot of great things happening right now with Katana.

I wanted to thank you for transparently sharing all this and what you’re doing to help brands with inventory and forecasting. It’s amazing.

Ben Hussey
Thank you, Steve. I really appreciate you having me on the show. It’s been a great conversation.

Steve Hutt
All right. Have yourself a great afternoon.

Ben Hussey
Thank you, Steve.