Why we changed this. This page used to be a form that promised quotes from five matched vendors within 48 hours. We no longer operate that service, so the form is gone rather than left sitting there collecting details it cannot act on. What replaces it is the part that was actually worth something: knowing what to ask.
Go to vendors directly
Every vendor we review takes enquiries through its own site, and going direct means no intermediary sees your requirements, your budget or your timeline before the vendor does. Our review pages describe who each platform genuinely suits:
- SAP EWM and Oracle WMS Cloud — large, complex, usually already committed to that vendor’s ERP
- Manhattan Associates and Blue Yonder — high-volume retail and omnichannel distribution
- Körber and Infor — mid-market to enterprise, strong in specific verticals
- NetSuite WMS and Fishbowl — smaller operations, often ERP-attached
If you are not yet sure which tier you belong in, start with the software category overview or the market overview.
Send every vendor the same brief
Quotes are only comparable if the vendors are quoting for the same thing. Write the brief once and send it unchanged to each. At minimum it should state:
- Scale. Number of sites, square footage, SKUs, daily order lines, peak-to-average ratio, and how many concurrent users.
- Process scope. Receiving, put-away, replenishment, picking method, packing, shipping, returns, cycle counting — and which of those you actually want the WMS to own.
- Integrations. The ERP, the e-commerce platform, the carriers, any MES or automation, and who is expected to build and own each interface.
- Deployment. Cloud or on-premise, and whether that is a preference or a hard constraint from your security or compliance team.
- Timeline. Go-live date and what is driving it, because urgency changes both price and what a vendor will commit to.
Our RFP template covers this in a structure you can send as-is.
Ask for the numbers vendors do not volunteer
A licence figure on its own tells you very little. Ask each vendor, in writing, for:
- Total cost over five years, not year one — licences, implementation, integration, infrastructure, training and annual support, itemised separately
- What triggers a price increase: user count, order volume, sites, transactions
- Implementation hours by role, and which of those hours are theirs and which are yours
- The cost of the integrations you listed, quoted individually
- Named reference customers of comparable size in your industry, and permission to call them
- What happens contractually if the go-live date slips, and who bears that cost
The ROI framework explains how to hold those figures against the savings you expect.
Before you sign
Insist on seeing the system handle your awkward cases, not a demo dataset: your worst SKU, your returns process, your peak day. Ask what data migration actually involves and who validates it. And read the support terms for response times against severity levels, because that is what you will live with long after the sales team has moved on.
Questions about a specific platform? Email [email protected]. We will tell you what we know and what we do not, and we have no financial interest in which vendor you choose — see how we make money.