Best Order Tracking for Custom & Made-to-Order Products

Our Picks for Custom Product Order Tracking

If you sell custom or made-to-order products, you already know the frustration: most order tracking tools assume your product is sitting on a shelf, ready to ship. They are built for the retail model — order comes in, item gets picked, label gets printed, package goes out. The entire notion of "tracking" starts at the carrier scan.

But for businesses that engrave, fabricate, sew, print, assemble, or otherwise create products after the order is placed, the most important part of the order lifecycle happens before any shipping label exists. Your customer's custom leather bag is not sitting in a warehouse. It is being cut, stitched, and finished over the course of several days. The tracking tools built for Amazon-style fulfillment have nothing to say about that process.

This gap is not just a software inconvenience — it directly affects customer satisfaction. When someone orders a custom product and sees a "processing" status that does not change for a week, they worry. They email you. They wonder if their order was forgotten. The production phase is where the most interesting work happens, but it is also where most tracking tools go silent.

Here is how four platforms handle order tracking for custom and made-to-order businesses, and which part of the problem each one actually solves.

TrackMy.Shop — Best for Production Workflow Tracking

TrackMy.Shop was built specifically for the problem custom product businesses face: tracking orders through a production process that has multiple stages, takes real time, and involves real people doing physical work.

The platform centers on a Kanban board where you define stages that match your actual workflow. A jeweler might use "Design Confirmation," "Casting," "Stone Setting," "Polishing," and "Ready to Ship." A sign maker might use "Art Proof," "Material Prep," "Fabrication," "Paint/Finish," and "Quality Check." The stages are yours to define, and you can change them as your process evolves.

Each order appears as a card on the board, and you can see at a glance how many orders are at each stage, which ones are falling behind, and where your team's effort is concentrated. This visual overview is something spreadsheets and status labels cannot replicate — it turns your entire production pipeline into something you can read in a few seconds.

The barcode scan-to-move feature was designed with workshop environments in mind. When your craftsperson finishes engraving a piece, they scan the order's barcode and it moves to the next stage. No login screen, no navigating menus, no hunting for the right order in a list. This is particularly valuable in environments where hands are dirty, gloves are worn, or the workflow has a physical rhythm that software interruptions disrupt.

On the customer side, branded tracking pages display your actual production stages. Instead of seeing "processing" for ten days, a customer sees "Stone Setting — In Progress" and knows their ring is actively being worked on. This transparency is transformative for custom product businesses. It reduces "where's my order?" inquiries, builds confidence in your process, and turns the wait time into an engaging part of the customer experience.

TrackMy.Shop integrates with Shopify, WooCommerce, and Invoice Ninja for automatic order import, and has a REST API for custom integrations. AI order parsing lets you create orders from paper forms, emails, or PDFs — useful for custom product businesses that still take orders through non-digital channels. The free plan covers 30 orders per month, and paid plans start at $19.99/mo.

Pros: Purpose-built for production workflows; fully customizable stages; barcode scan-to-move for workshop floors; branded tracking pages showing real production progress; AI parsing for paper and email orders; generous free plan.

Cons: Not a materials or cost tracking tool — does not calculate cost-per-item; does not handle shipping labels natively (use Shippo or a separate label provider).

Craftybase — Best for Material Cost Tracking

Craftybase approaches the custom product space from a completely different angle: materials and costs. It helps you track what raw materials go into each product, calculate your true cost-per-item, manage material inventory, and understand your pricing and profitability.

For makers who struggle with the question "am I actually making money on this product after materials, labor, and overhead?", Craftybase provides real answers. It tracks material purchases, assigns materials to products, calculates cost of goods sold, and generates reports useful for tax time. Integration with Shopify and Etsy pulls in sales data so costs and revenue line up.

Where Craftybase falls short is in production workflow tracking. It offers basic manufacturing management — you can log that production happened — but there is no Kanban board, no visual pipeline, no barcode scanning, and no customer-facing tracking pages. Your customers cannot see what stage their order is in. Craftybase tells you what your products cost to make; it does not help you manage the process of making them.

This is why Craftybase and TrackMy.Shop complement each other rather than competing. Craftybase handles the financial side of production (material costs, pricing, COGS), while TrackMy.Shop handles the operational side (workflow stages, order movement, customer communication). Many custom product businesses benefit from both.

Craftybase starts at $19/mo with no free tier.

Pros: Excellent material cost tracking; true cost-per-item calculations; useful tax reporting; Shopify and Etsy integration; helps with pricing strategy.

Cons: No Kanban board or visual production tracking; no barcode scanning; no customer-facing tracking pages; no free plan; solves the cost problem, not the workflow problem.

ShipStation — Best for Shipping After Production

ShipStation enters the picture at the end of the production process — when the custom product is finished and ready to ship. It handles carrier rate comparison, label creation, and batch shipping efficiently. For custom product businesses that process a meaningful volume of shipments, ShipStation's automation features save time at the packing station.

The reality for most custom product businesses, though, is that shipping is not the hard part. The hard part is everything that comes before: managing the queue of orders in production, keeping track of which orders are at which stage, communicating progress to customers, and identifying when something is falling behind. ShipStation has nothing to offer for any of that.

If you pair ShipStation with a production tracking tool like TrackMy.Shop, you get a complete workflow: TrackMy.Shop manages the order from intake through production, and ShipStation handles the final mile of label printing and carrier selection. Used alone for a custom product business, ShipStation leaves the most critical part of your workflow unmanaged.

Pricing starts at $9.99/mo with no free tier.

Pros: Strong carrier rate comparison; reliable label printing; good for batch shipping; extensive carrier support; useful after production is complete.

Cons: No production tracking whatsoever; no customer visibility into the making process; does not solve the core problem custom product businesses face; no free plan.

Ordoro — Best for Custom Products with Inventory Complexity

Ordoro is a multi-channel inventory and fulfillment platform. For custom product businesses that also maintain pre-made inventory across multiple sales channels, Ordoro can coordinate stock levels and prevent overselling. It also handles dropshipping for businesses that source some products from suppliers while making others in-house.

However, Ordoro does not address the production side of custom products. There is no way to define workflow stages, track orders through a making process, or give customers visibility into production progress. Barcode scanning is limited to inventory counts. At $59/mo as the starting price, Ordoro is a significant investment for a tool that does not solve the core challenge of custom product order management.

For businesses that primarily need production tracking with occasional inventory coordination, Ordoro is an expensive solution to the wrong problem. It is relevant only if multi-channel inventory management is genuinely a primary concern alongside custom production work.

Pros: Multi-channel inventory sync; dropshipping support; handles complex fulfillment across channels.

Cons: No production workflow features; no customer-facing production tracking; expensive at $59/mo; does not address the core need of custom product businesses; barcode scanning limited to inventory.

Buying Guide: What Do Custom Product Businesses Actually Need?

Custom and made-to-order businesses face a specific set of challenges that generic ecommerce tools do not address:

Production stage visibility. You need to know where every order stands in your production process — not just "processing" or "shipped," but the specific stage. Is it in design? Being assembled? Waiting for quality check? A Kanban board with custom stages solves this.

Customer communication. Your customers want to know their order is being worked on. Branded tracking pages that show real production stages eliminate most "where's my order?" inquiries and turn wait time into engagement.

Workshop-friendly operation. Production floors are not office desks. Barcode scan-to-move lets workers advance orders without stopping to use a computer, which matters when your hands are covered in resin, sawdust, or paint.

Cost tracking. Understanding what each custom product costs to make — in materials, time, and overhead — is essential for pricing correctly and staying profitable. This is a separate concern from workflow management.

Shipping. Getting the finished product to the customer at the best rate is the final step, and standard shipping tools handle it well.

The key insight is that custom product businesses usually need a combination of tools, not a single platform that tries to do everything. A production workflow tool (TrackMy.Shop) plus a cost tracker (Craftybase) plus a shipping tool (Pirate Ship or ShipStation) covers the full lifecycle better than any single tool can.

The Bottom Line

Standard order tracking tools were built for the retail fulfillment model and have nothing to say about the making process. If you sell custom or made-to-order products, your most critical tracking need is production workflow visibility — for your team and for your customers. TrackMy.Shop is the only tool on this list that provides it. Pair it with Craftybase for cost management and a shipping solution of your choice for a complete custom product workflow.