I ran ecommerce stores for years, invoices and inventory almost broke me

For years, I ran online stores, including a body-piercing jewelry shop that had hundreds of SKUs and variants.

Every time I brought on a new supplier, it felt like I was stuck in a never-ending cycle: dealing with PDF proformas, juggling spreadsheets, copying prices, figuring out shipping and taxes, correcting Excel blunders, and then manually uploading everything to the store. It was a time-consuming process, and mistakes were bound to happen.

The toughest part wasn’t the selling itself. It was getting a clear grasp on actual product costs, taxes, and maintaining consistent inventory when everything relied on manual data entry.

After going through this for years, I finally decided to create a small internal tool to help me manage invoices, costs, and inventory more efficiently, mainly because I couldn’t find anything that suited my business's needs at that stage.

This experience got me thinking about how others tackle these challenges today:

Do you find yourself entering invoice data into spreadsheets by hand?

How do you manage shipping, duties, or taxes for your products?

When did inventory and cost management become too much to handle?

I’m not trying to sell anything here, I'm genuinely curious about how widespread this struggle is and what workflows actually work for real e-commerce businesses.

I’d love to hear how you manage it!