Most software pages are organized by feature. Most buyers are not. You know your business as a sentence: we import from overseas factories, we sell Shopify and wholesale, a 3PL ships for us, our reps write the orders. This page maps those sentences to how AIMS360 runs each of them, so you can start from the way your company works instead of translating it into ERP vocabulary.
AIMS360 is one ERP for consumer brands. What changes from brand to brand is not the product, it is which workflows carry the weight: an importer lives in purchase orders and landed cost, a manufacturer lives in cut tickets and work in process, an EDI vendor lives in retailer compliance, and a Shopify plus wholesale brand lives in one shared inventory number. Find the sentence below that sounds like your company, and it will point you to the exact workflows and pages that matter for you.
Most brands are two or three of these at once. That is normal, and it is the point: the models below are one system wearing different configurations, not separate products.
| If you say this | You are | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| "We import finished goods from overseas factories" | An apparel importer | ERP for apparel importers |
| "We cut and sew, here or with contractors" | A manufacturer | ERP for apparel manufacturers |
| "We buy lines and resell them to retailers" | A wholesale distributor | Distributors |
| "We sell on Shopify and to wholesale accounts" | A Shopify + wholesale hybrid | Shopify + wholesale |
| "We ship to department stores and big box chains" | A wholesale EDI vendor | Wholesale EDI |
| "Retailers list us and we dropship to their customers" | A dropship vendor | Dropship |
| "We run our own warehouse" or "a 3PL ships for us" | A fulfillment question, not a product one | Warehouse & 3PL |
| "Independent reps and showrooms write our orders" | A rep-driven brand | Sales reps |
| "We also have our own stores" | An omnichannel brand | Retail stores |
| "We take orders before goods exist" | A pre-order brand | Pre-order |
Your season starts with a factory PO, months before the goods exist. The work is knowing what is coming, when it lands, and what it really costs: vendor purchase orders with the full style, color and size breakdown, visibility into what is on the water, landed cost that rolls freight, duty and fees into the true per-unit number, and receiving that checks cartons against what was ordered. Because purchase orders and work in process live in the same system as orders and inventory, you can sell against goods that have not landed yet without overselling.
Production is your operation, not a line item. AIMS360 links raw materials, bills of materials, cut tickets, contractors and work in process to finished goods inventory, with garment dye and screen printing processes tracked along the way. The point is one thread from the fabric you bought to the garment you invoiced, so costing is real, delivery dates are honest, and production planning works from what is actually on the floor. If you both make and import, the two flows share one catalog and one set of books.
A distributor's day is orders in volume: buy inventory, hold it, sell it across many accounts at tiered prices, and keep margin visible the whole way. AIMS360 runs the wholesale order book, warehouse and shipping, retailer EDI where your accounts require it, and accounting in one place, with reporting by style, customer and channel so you can see which lines and accounts actually make money. The same one-inventory discipline applies: every account sells against the same stock number.
The whole game here is one trustworthy inventory number. Shopify inventory and orders sync in real time, wholesale and B2B orders work from the same pool, and incoming production is visible so neither channel oversells the other. Shopify stays your storefront; AIMS360 is the operations layer underneath, purchasing, inventory, fulfillment and accounting, feeding both channels one truth. This is the most common shape we see brands grow into, and the one Shopify's native tools alone cannot hold.
Selling to majors means their rules: EDI documents on spec, routing guides, ship windows, and chargebacks when anything misses. AIMS360 has native EDI with 350+ retailer connections, so purchase orders land against live inventory and ASNs and invoices go back compliant. And because many brands in this model factor their receivables, order credit approvals and invoice assignments flow to factoring partners from the same system, no re-keying between your ERP, your EDI vendor and your factor, because they are not three systems.
Dropship flips the shipping burden onto you: the retailer sells one unit, you ship it to their customer under their rules, with the paperwork to prove it. That is an EDI and order-routing problem at consumer speed. AIMS360 processes dropship orders through the same order management and EDI backbone as bulk wholesale, connected to the dropship platforms retailers run on, so single-unit orders, inventory feeds and shipment confirmations move without a person re-typing them.
Fulfillment is less a model than a choice every other model has to make, and most growing brands end up in the middle: an own warehouse plus a 3PL, or two locations and a season of overflow. With your own building, AIMS360 is the WMS: bin locations, barcodes and scanning, pick tickets, receiving and counts. With a 3PL, AIMS360 stays the system of record and exchanges the warehouse documents with your provider. And when you run more than one location at once, inventory stays one pool with visibility per warehouse, which is the whole trick: where stock sits changes, what is true about it does not.
Rep-driven brands run on trust and arithmetic: reps need to write orders against real availability, and everyone needs to believe the commission math. In AIMS360, orders carry their rep, commissions calculate automatically on sales orders, invoices and payments with flexible structures including multi-rep splits, and B2B platforms give reps and buyers a way to order against live inventory. The commission statement stops being a monthly argument and becomes a report.
A store is one more place the same inventory lives. AIMS360 tracks retail store inventory alongside the warehouse, and Shopify POS connects the register to the same pool your ecommerce and wholesale orders draw from. The question a store owner actually asks, can I sell this here without breaking a wholesale order there, gets answered by the system instead of by a phone call to the warehouse.
Pre-orders and early wholesale bookings are how apparel seasons have always worked; the difference software makes is honesty at scale. Because purchase orders and work in process are visible with expected dates, orders can reserve stock or incoming production, and customer pre-orders can generate allocated purchase orders directly, so what you commit to buyers is tied to what you actually told the factory to make.
Yes. Purchasing and production, vendor POs, cut tickets and work in process, live in the same system as inventory, orders, EDI, shipping and accounting. That is the practical meaning of one ERP: the PO you place, the goods you receive and the order you invoice are one record trail, not three tools stitched together.
It gives you the visibility that planning depends on: purchase orders with ship dates, work in process by stage, what is on the water with expected dates, and receiving against the PO. Purchasing can also be automated from demand forecasts or order criteria, so what you ask factories to make follows what is actually selling.
Shopify and Shopify Plus with real-time inventory and order sync, Shopify B2B, wholesale platforms including JOOR and RepSpark, EDI with 350+ retailer connections, 3PL integrations, and QuickBooks accounting sync. Importers add the purchasing side: vendor POs, import tracking and landed cost are native, not integrations.
If you live on styles, colors, sizes and seasons, you need apparel-native software that also does distribution, not generic distribution software that flattens your catalog into SKUs. The test is simple: ask the vendor to show a size run on a purchase order, a pick ticket and an invoice. AIMS360 is built matrix-first, with the distribution workflows, orders, warehouse, EDI, shipping, on top.
The honest answer: brands that combine several of these at once. A typical AIMS360 customer imports or manufactures, sells Shopify plus wholesale, ships some accounts over EDI, and may use a 3PL, and the value is running that whole combination on one inventory and one ledger instead of one tool per model.
Start with the model where your operational pain is today, that is usually purchasing and landed cost for importers, or inventory sync for Shopify plus wholesale, then read the second one. The models on this page are configurations of one system, so combining them is normal, not an integration project.
Yes, and it is common. Vendor purchase orders cover raw materials and finished goods, and they link to cut tickets for domestic production, so made-here and imported styles share one purchasing flow, one inventory and one set of books.
Yes, if the system can see it coming. Purchase orders and work in process make incoming goods visible with expected dates, and orders can reserve stock or incoming production. That is how pre-orders and early bookings get filled without overselling.
The typical AIMS360 customer is a consumer brand roughly in the $5M to $100M range, though the fit is more about operations than revenue: once wholesale, importing or EDI enters the picture, spreadsheets plus an accounting package stop holding the business together, and that is the moment brands move.
Yes, and both matter. Industry pages cover what you make, apparel, footwear, beauty, outdoor and more. This page covers how you operate, importing, manufacturing, distributing, selling across channels. Your best starting point is the intersection: a footwear importer reads the footwear page for category fit and the importer section here for workflow fit.
Last reviewed 9 August 2026 by the AIMS360 product team.
Reviewed against the AIMS360 feature set as published across the features, integrations and guides sections. Business models describe common operating patterns, not separate products; your own configuration is set during implementation.
Bring the one-line description of how your brand runs, importer, manufacturer, Shopify plus wholesale, rep-driven, all of the above. We will walk your actual workflow through AIMS360, not a generic demo.
