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When building a business in the circular economy—whether it’s rentals, resale, or refurbishment—choosing the right platform is critical. While Shopify is the industry standard for traditional "linear" retail, re-commerce introduces operational complexities that require a specialized approach.
In this clip, Tuomo Laine (CEO & Co-founder of TWICE Commerce) explores the fundamental architectural differences between TWICE Commerce and Shopify, specifically focusing on Inventory Management.
In a linear model (like Shopify), a product usually has a simple one-to-one relationship with a SKU. You have a new iPhone 17, and you have 50 identical units in a warehouse.
In recommerce, however, those 50 units are distinct. They have different acquisition sources, unique conditions, specific repair histories, and varying costs. Tuomo explains how TWICE Commerce allows merchants to track this granular data on the backend (serialized inventory) while keeping the frontend experience simple for the customer.
Karri: Maybe just to clarify there where you brought it up Shopify, like if there is couple key differences, how is TWICE different from Shopify? What would they be like you mentioned linear and circular?
Tuomo: I think the key things are we are a lot more robust when it comes to inventory management due to the fact that inventory management is so big thing in re-commerce. I have to simplify many things just to make a point but for example if we look into inventory and catalog management Shopify can make an assumption that all right you have a product that you want to sell they mainly do sales so you have a product you want to sell for that product we can create a product page for your website and then you can just tell me what's the skew of this thing and then how many of those do you have across your warehouses. So there's like one to one to one relationship of like okay one almost like one product page how many of you have the of these the skews and then you might have okay how many of these you might have in multiple warehouses.
Tuomo: Now in TWICE since it's re-commerce even though I have one skew so let's say one I have a skew of so stock keeping unit of I don't know iPhone 13 all of my 50 iPhone 13's are a little bit different in different in terms of from who might have I bought it what's the condition whether I have refurbished them how much I've spent in refurbishment so it's not any more a simple relationship where every you want we would like to have 50 skews for all of those and then but still one product page so there's already there there's differences.
Tuomo: The other one is that and that's one of the reasons why we've done this separation is that since inventory management inventory flows are so important operational capabilities we have made it very relaxed and a dynamic when it comes to what you actually have on an operation level so modeling your inventory where you can model things in a serialized way and still group them by skew if you want and all of the things that we touched upon earlier making sure that you have maintenance tracking and availability tracking in place but that doesn't mean that all of that complexity that you want in your inventory management and granularity that you want to reflect that to the end user.
Tuomo: You still want to provide the end user with very easy simple or an understandable booking experiences or purchase experiences so instead of having just a skew see like a quite naive skew relationship in saying what is this digital product page pointing to we have more dynamic relationships where you can say that what does this sales listing or booking listing need from your inventory if someone purchases it and with bookings of course it's the question of what if someone books this listing for from Friday to Sunday what do I need and are those available.
Tuomo: That relationship is not only done by skews you can just say that I need anything with the brand of X and condition of something and more than 1000 hours of usage which makes it very flexible for you to productize things and finally I want to say that we kind of assume that you can create even five listings that are all pointing at the end of the day to the same inventory item you're just productizing it different in different ways.
Tuomo: So maybe this is the one key difference or a few key differences when it comes to Shopify and us we're a lot more heavy in helping you to model and track your inventory and we're more relaxed in in how like allowing you to create multiple sales listings and booking listings that monetize that inventory so that your complex inventory tracking doesn't come at the cost of user experience but we do a little bit a lot less actually a lot less heavy lifting when it comes to providing online store themes and so on and where Shopify is is huge and so on and I want to also say that we do have customers that use Shopify storefronts and just kind of elect to use our inventory tracking and that listing capabilities to be able to still reflect these things in their Shopify stores.