How Cardinal Gates Handles 1,000+ Orders a Week Across 10+ Channels
Cardinal Gates sells safety gates through Amazon, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Target, and a half dozen other channels. Webgility posts every order into the right QuickBooks account, which is a big part of how a small team kept up with 5x their order growth.
Key Results
5x Order Growth, Zero New Hires
Dropship volume went from 200–300 orders a week to 1,000+, with Mondays alone bringing 500–600. Nobody was hired just to keep the books up.
10+ Channels, One Set of Clean Books
Every storefront posts into its own QuickBooks account automatically. No more sorting one big pile by hand.
See It, Fix It, Rerun It
The team can spot a bad sync, pull those orders back, and run them again — instead of staring at a bar that just says “done.”
Under 1 Hour to a Support Answer
When something breaks, Webgility responds within the hour, usually with a fix or a call already set up.
About Cardinal Gates
Cardinal Gates has been making child and pet safety gates for nearly 30 years. The products last so long that customers regularly call in after 15 or 20 years because a latch finally wore out. The line now covers more than 20 gates, including the flagship Stairway Special and the acrylic crystal gates that came with the Kudos Safety acquisition. The company built its business on wholesale, then shifted to direct-to-consumer and dropship, and today ships for nearly every major U.S. retailer.
- Industry
- Child & Pet Safety Products
- Business Type
- Multichannel: DTC, dropship, and marketplaces (Amazon, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Target, Walmart, Chewy, Wayfair, Tractor Supply, CardinalGates.com)
- Customer Since
- 2021
- Location
- United States
- Tools Implemented
- WooCommerce, QuickBooks Desktop, ShipStation, Rhythm (formerly ChannelAdvisor), Webgility
- Their Mission
- Keep kids and pets safe with products built to last — not the cheapest gate on the shelf, the better one.
Cardinal Gates Faced
- 1Everything Typed In By Hand: Invoices, shipping labels, order entry — all of it was manual. That worked when the website got 10–20 orders a week, but it was never going to survive the shift to direct-to-consumer.
- 2Connectors That Broke, Then Hid It: SPS Commerce and QuickBooks Connects failed almost daily, and the team couldn’t see what had failed or fix anything themselves. Fixing a sync meant calling support and waiting for a callback.
- 3One Big Pile in QuickBooks: Orders from 10 to 15 storefronts all dumped into a single bucket, so someone had to sort every transaction into the right channel by hand.
- 4Growth Outrunning the Process: Order volume was headed from 300 a week toward 1,000. Every stalled sync held up invoicing, then payments, then the close — one stuck step slowed the whole day.
Cardinal Gates Adopted Webgility
- 1Orders Flow to the Right Books on Their Own: Orders come in through Rhythm and ShipStation, then Webgility posts each one into the correct channel-specific QuickBooks account — no sorting, no re-keying.
- 2The Team Can See and Fix Things Themselves: Beth can check what synced, change settings, and pull back and rerun any orders that didn’t post right, instead of being blind to it like with the old tools.
- 3A Setup Built Around Their Business: Webgility customized the install to post into individual QuickBooks accounts and has kept adjusting it as channels came and went, with support emails answered within the hour.
- 4Room to Hand Off More: Cardinal Gates recently upgraded its plan so Webgility will take on reconciliation and month-end work, giving their accounting lead back those locked-in-her-office days.
“If Webgility didn’t exist tomorrow? I’m going home. We’re just not doing that day. Out of all the companies we use, Webgility is the most responsive. It’s an emergency for them just as it’s an emergency for me. And I can see everything it’s doing instead of being blind. That makes a big difference.”
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