Core product sometimes works, everything around it doesn't
We are a UK-based digital agency that evaluated Fishbowl alongside a US client as part of a formal tender process. 18 months on, we would not make the same decision again.
The onboarding was chaotic. Critical information was dropped on us the night before go-live. Test data was never cleared, corrupting live inventory and costing weeks of manual recovery. The QuickBooks integration failed on launch day and took four days to restore. Our client's warehouse staff resorted to handwriting shipping labels because the labelling system could not produce them.
Fishbowl Commerce, the middleware that connects WooCommerce to the warehouse, is not built by Fishbowl. It runs on a third-party platform called Sellware. When it breaks, and it has broken multiple times, orders stop flowing entirely. We have experienced two separate outages where six-figure order volumes were stranded because this middleware went down.
During the most recent outage, support recommended deleting the entire commerce connection and starting over. The same technician admitted on the call that he did not understand the problem. We independently confirmed that the Sellware web application was broken at the code level, meaning following that advice would have left our client unable to reconnect at all.
Support is slow, circular, and lacks escalation procedures. A single stuck order took 30 days to resolve. Support asked us for screenshots we had already provided, asked irrelevant questions, and had to be walked through the issue from scratch multiple times.
The account manager promised a partnership approach after an escalation meeting. We were then ghosted when we tried to expand the account, including a ShipStation integration.
Fishbowl's core inventory tracking works. But if you need reliable ecommerce integration, responsive support, or an implementation team that prepares properly, look elsewhere.