Small and medium-sized businesses that sell goods online and off have a problem — there are few tools out there to seamlessly connect order processing and inventory management. Instead, they’re forced to use multiple applications for accounting, inventory, payment processing, and fulfillment. Los Angeles-based Lettuce hopes to solve that problem, with an intuitive platform for managing orders and inventory.
Lettuce’s web-based platform provides the connective tissue between capturing orders, managing inventory, accounting for sales, processing payments, and order fulfillment. Rather than manually entering information into all these disparate systems, businesses can use Lettuce to manage all those pieces of its business from one online dashboard. In addition, Lettuce has created an iPad application to capture orders from sales reps on the go.
As a SaaS-based system, Lettuce charges businesses monthly for access to its platform. It currently charges $59 a month, with each additional user costing $25 more, but it’s opening two new tiers of service. One will be a no-frills option for $29 that gives users the ability to use its iPad app for capturing orders but not much else. The other is a $119 per month and includes CRM and e-commerce integration, as well as the ability to serve wholesale customers as well.
According to Raad Mobrem, CEO of Lettuce, the company was founded after he had to deal with this problem himself. His former company, Durable Ideas, had a problem keeping up with orders and fulfilling them as they were coming in. He investigated different systems such as Netsuite and SAP but found them too complicated and expensive for small businesses. So he built his own platform, integrating with systems used by small businesses such as Quickbooks, Salesforce, Shopify, Magento, Stripe, Fedex, and UPS.
Since launching about a month and a half ago, Lettuce has processed more than $2 million in orders. But it’s looking to expand pretty quickly. To make its platform more widely available, Lettuce has raised a $2.1 seed round from investors such as Crosscut Ventures, 500 Startups, Launchpad LA, Baroda Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, Double M Capital, and others.
It’s not the only startup going after this space: There’s also San Francisco-based Stitch Labs, which has its own inventory- and order-management system for small and medium-sized businesses. But SMBs are a huge market, so I’m sure there’s more than enough business to go around.