I've been on the other side of this problem
Twenty years ago, I was running a manufacturing company. We needed a website that could take orders and let customers browse our products. Simple enough, right?
We went through three different projects with different agencies. First BigCommerce, then WooCommerce, then Drupal Commerce. A couple of failed launches before we finally got something live. And even then, every single thing was manual.
We were running QuickBooks Desktop. If we wanted to add a new product, we had to add it in QuickBooks and then go add it again on the website. New customer? Set them up in QuickBooks, then manually create their account on the site. If something went out of stock in QuickBooks, the website had no idea. Pricing had to be updated in both places.
And the worst part - when an order came through the website, I'd get an email. I'd print out that email and put it in the stack with all the fax orders that came in that day. Our data entry team would then manually key every one of those orders into QuickBooks. It was horrendous.
Even as bad as it was, we were still excited because we had a website that could take orders. That was the bar back then.
When I met Bruce and Darren - the founders of Web Ninja in Australia - and saw what they'd built, it clicked immediately. This was what we'd needed. True, deep, bidirectional integration with the accounting system. Not a bolt-on connector that syncs a few fields. The real thing. They'd already proven it with hundreds of businesses across Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore.
I partnered with them in 2018 to bring the platform to North America as Kinein. Having lived through the pain of building and maintaining a disconnected website, what we offer through Kinein is something I'm genuinely proud to put in front of people. We're not trying to make you a great Kinein user - we're trying to make you a better user of your existing accounting system. Because that's what you should be managing. The website is just downstream from there.
