Stackd is built for sole traders to mid-size firms managing international trade. Replace fragmented social platforms, spreadsheets, and manual tracking with one intelligent operations system — wherever you source, wherever you ship.
Six entities, one platform. Built from lived operational experience on the China–Caribbean trade lane. No enterprise bloat, no per-user pricing, no irrelevant features.
Every supplier with contacts, payment terms, lead times, risk flags, and compliance certificate tracking. Built for Chinese manufacturers — WeChat numbers, dial codes, and all.
Build quotes with full landed cost calculations — freight, duty, Dangerous Goods (DG) surcharges, insurance, and FX built in. Price history tracked per SKU. Convert to invoice in one click.
BL number, vessel, carrier, ETD, ETA, container type, Dangerous Goods (DG) status — all in one view. Know where every container is without calling your freight forwarder at 11pm.
Full invoice lifecycle — draft, pro-forma, sent, partially paid, paid. Credit notes, payment recording, automatic status flips. Balance due calculated in real time.
Auto-generated from invoice line items, grouped by supplier. One PO per supplier per shipment. Deposit tracking, FPM-funded deposit recovery, settlement status.
An AI trained on your specific workflows, invoice rules, and Caribbean/West Africa tax treatment. Ask it anything — it knows your operations, not just generic procurement theory.
Use them before you ever create an account. Built from the same logic that powers the Stackd platform. All figures in USD.
Enter your shipment details. Get a full landed cost breakdown including freight, origin charges, destination charges, insurance, duty, and Dangerous Goods surcharge if applicable.
How many hours per week are you losing to manual tracking, status chasing, and document management? Enter your current operation and we'll show you the real cost.
5 questions. 2 minutes. Find out which Stackd tier fits where you are right now.
Most trade intermediaries hit an invisible ceiling at three containers a month. This paper explains why it happens, what breaks first, and the operational infrastructure that removes the constraint — without adding headcount.
There is a moment every growing trade intermediary recognises. Orders are coming in. Suppliers are performing. Buyers are happy. Revenue is climbing. And then — without warning — everything starts to feel harder. Response times slip. A shipment goes quiet for three days. An invoice goes out with the wrong line items. A buyer calls asking where their container is and you genuinely don't know.
This is the three-container ceiling. It is not a commercial problem. It is an operational one. The manual systems that worked perfectly at one container a month — WhatsApp for supplier communication, Excel for invoicing, phone calls for shipment tracking — do not scale. They were never designed to.
Based on our own operational experience at FPM International and conversations across the UK's Caribbean and West African trade community, the same three systems fail in the same order.
When you have one container, you can track it manually. You know which freight forwarder is handling it, you have the BL number, and you check in once a day. When you have three containers across two freight forwarders on different trade lanes, the cognitive load becomes unmanageable. You are one WhatsApp message away from losing track of £80,000 of goods in transit.
The solution is not to call more frequently. It is to build a single source of truth — a system that knows where every container is, what its status is, when it is expected, and what documentation is outstanding — without requiring a human to maintain it.
"I was spending two hours every morning just figuring out where everything was. That's before I'd done a single commercial thing. It was unsustainable." — Trade intermediary, South London, sourcing from Qingdao to Bridgetown.
Excel invoices work until the moment they don't. A transposed digit in a unit price. A freight charge that should have been £450 entered as £45. A line item from last month's order copied into this month's invoice. These errors are inevitable at volume and they are expensive — both in the correction time and in the commercial credibility they erode with buyers.
Beyond accuracy, there is the deeper problem of margin visibility. Do you know your true margin on each order? Not the headline markup, but the net figure after freight, origin charges, destination charges, insurance, and local logistics? Most sole traders do not. They know they are profitable in aggregate, but they cannot tell you whether Order A or Order B delivered better returns. This makes pricing decisions guesswork.
Your suppliers are the engine of your business. Their reliability, their compliance with certification requirements, their responsiveness when something goes wrong — these variables determine your commercial performance more than almost anything else. Yet most sole traders manage these relationships entirely in their heads, supplemented by a contact book and a WhatsApp history.
What happens when you take on a new supplier for a product category you have not sourced before? How do you assess their reliability? How do you know whether their factory visit notes match their delivery track record? Without a system, you cannot.
Scaling from one to ten containers does not require hiring an operations manager. It requires building the right infrastructure — a connected set of systems that automate the administrative work so that you can focus on the commercial work that only you can do.
The infrastructure stack has five layers, and they must be built in the right order. Building layer three before layer one is complete creates more problems than it solves.
Before you can do anything else, you need a single record for every supplier that contains: full legal name, country, contact person, email, phone including WeChat ID, currency, payment terms, lead time, required certifications, and any operational risk flags. This is not a contact book. It is a structured dataset that other systems can reference.
Every SKU you source needs a catalogue record with unit cost, unit sell price, unit of measure, and HS code. This is the foundation of accurate invoicing and true margin calculation. Without it, every invoice is built from memory and every margin calculation is approximate.
Invoices generated from the catalogue, not from a blank spreadsheet. Payment status tracked per invoice. Balance due calculated automatically. Credit notes issued against specific invoice references. This eliminates the most common source of commercial disputes with buyers.
POs auto-generated from invoice line items, grouped by supplier. Deposit tracking against each PO. Status updated from Draft through to Settled. This closes the loop between what you have sold and what you have committed to buy.
Every active shipment with BL number, vessel name, carrier, origin and destination ports, ETD, ETA, container type, and DG status. This is the layer that eliminates the 11pm phone call. When a buyer asks where their container is, you answer in thirty seconds from a single screen.
Every feature in an operational platform should be evaluated against one question: does this remove manual work, or does it just move it somewhere else?
This principle — automation first — governs every build decision at Stackd. When an invoice is saved, purchase orders are automatically generated for each supplier. When a payment is recorded and reaches the invoice total, the status automatically flips to Paid. When a shipment BL number is entered, the system polls the carrier API and updates status without human input.
The goal is not a more organised spreadsheet. The goal is a system that runs the administrative layer of your operation so that you do not have to.
"Automation first is not a feature. It is a design philosophy. Every additional manual step in an operational system is a tax on the operator's time. That tax compounds with volume."
A sole trader managing three containers a month with eight active suppliers and two active buyers typically spends between 12 and 18 hours per week on administrative tasks: chasing shipment status, producing invoices, updating spreadsheets, communicating with suppliers about order confirmations, and reconciling payments.
At a conservative opportunity cost of £50 per hour, that is £600–£900 per week in administrative overhead — £31,200–£46,800 per year. The question is not whether operational infrastructure is worth investing in. The question is why it took this long.
Stackd's Growth tier, which covers all five layers of the operational infrastructure stack with unlimited shipments and up to three users, costs £149 per month — £1,788 per year. At the conservative end of the administrative overhead estimate, that is a return of more than 17:1 in recovered time value alone. And that is before accounting for the commercial upside of being able to take on more orders without hiring.
The most common mistake is attempting to implement the entire stack at once. A sole trader who tries to migrate their entire operation — all suppliers, all line items, all historical invoices — in a single weekend will spend most of that weekend fighting data quality problems and give up before seeing the benefit.
Start with one supplier. One product category. One active shipment. Enter those records correctly. See the system work. Then expand. The operational infrastructure for a ten-container-a-month business can be built in thirty days if it is approached incrementally.
The moment that changes everything is not when the system is fully populated. It is the first time a buyer asks where their container is and you answer in thirty seconds from a single screen without making a single phone call. That is the moment the investment pays for itself.
No per-user pricing at entry level. No annual contracts required. No credit card to start a trial. Monthly billing, cancel anytime.
Stackd was not designed in a product workshop or built from market research. It was built because FPM International — a Brighton-based trade intermediary sourcing from Chinese manufacturers and supplying Caribbean markets — ran out of road with spreadsheets and WhatsApp.
Every feature in Stackd exists because it solved a real operational problem at FPM. The shipment tracking tab exists because we were making phone calls at 11pm to find out where containers were. The AI assistant exists because we needed to translate supplier documents from Mandarin at 2am. The landed cost calculator exists because we were losing margin to miscalculated freight allocations.
This is not a product built for a market the founder read about. It is a product built from the inside of the problem — by an operator who lives it every week.
FPM International is Stackd's founding client. The platform manages FPM's live invoices, active supplier relationships, and shipment pipeline. When we ship a new feature, it goes into production at FPM before it goes anywhere else. That discipline keeps us honest about what actually works.
Every feature is evaluated against one question: does this remove manual work or does it just move it? If it does not eliminate a step the operator currently does manually, it does not ship. Non-negotiable.
Stackd is designed for one specific operator: the UK-based sole trader or micro-firm sourcing from China and selling to the Caribbean or West Africa. We will never dilute this focus to chase a broader market.
Your data is yours. We do not sell it, share it, or use it for anything beyond running your account. The Supplier Intelligence product uses aggregate anonymous data only — individual transaction data is always private.
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