OrderMyGear and commonsku: Group Stores and the Job Behind Them

OrderMyGear runs the group store where everybody picks a size and pays. commonsku runs the job that store creates. A former promo rep on how the two fit together, the handoff between them, and how SIPS keeps the pipeline connected.

Has this ever happened to you? A coach texts you a photo of a clipboard. Forty-one names, sizes in three different handwritings, two kids listed twice, and a note that says "somebody's mom will pay Friday." You're a distributor. You're also, apparently, the team mom now.

If you've sold spirit wear, you know the feeling. Collecting sizes and chasing money is a second job nobody quoted you for, and the hoodies haven't even been ordered yet.

That's the moment people start searching for OrderMyGear and commonsku in the same breath. Here's how they fit.

Two moments in the same order

These two show up at different points in a job, so start there.

OrderMyGear is a group ordering platform. Per public descriptions, distributors set up temporary online stores where each member of a team, club or company picks their own item, picks their size, and pays for it. The store opens for a set window and then closes.

commonsku describes itself as CRM plus order management for promo distributors. The job runs presentation to estimate to sales order to purchase order to proof to invoice, with the supplier inside the loop. It has its own Shops too, and its integrations page says its ShipStation connection ships sales orders and shop checkouts.

The boundary on this table: it's what each one says about itself, pulled on 2026-10-11. It isn't a score. If stores are a big part of your business, ask both companies to show you their store workflow with one of your real programs.

The handoff is where the hours go

A store closes. Now somebody has to turn a pile of individual orders into one production job. Item numbers, sizes, quantities, decoration detail, ship-to. That handoff happens on the exact day everybody is in a hurry, because the store just closed and the event is in three weeks.

Whatever you run, that handoff deserves its own attention. Ask the questions before the season starts:

• When a store closes, how do the orders get to the place where the job runs?
• What's automatic, and what does a person on my team retype?
• How does the supplier get the PO and the proof?
• How do I see every past store for this client when they call next year?

The last one matters more than it sounds. Spirit wear is seasonal. The client who ran a store last August is going to run one again, and the distributor who reaches out in June gets the job.

The boundary: I'm not going to tell you one store setup beats another. How your orders arrive decides that. Count your last twenty orders and mark each one "one buyer" or "many buyers." That ratio tells you how much of your business runs through stores at all.

Keep the history yours

Free step. Once a month, export your client list and order history, store results included, from whatever you run. Save it somewhere you control, in a format a spreadsheet opens, with the date in the file name. Next year's reorder list is sitting in that file.

Where SIPS fits

Disclosure. I build software for this industry. SIPS (Stout Intel Promotional Software) is the promo-focused CRM I built to manage a client's whole sales life: the relationship, the pipeline, and the follow-ups. It's the part that remembers the coach before the season starts. It doesn't run stores and it isn't accounting, inventory or ERP.

If you run commonsku, SIPS works with it. It reads the public share links you already send clients and brings the order details across: client, contact, line items, SKUs, quantities, cost, sell, margin per line, decoration detail, artwork, in-hands date and ship-to. No double entry and no data migration. The estimate, the sales order and the invoice land on one job through exact job number matching, and stages only move forward. It works the same on Essentials, Advanced or Enterprise, with no login, no credential, and nothing to configure on commonsku's side.

When a share page layout changes, the parser breaks loudly instead of importing a wrong number. Here's how the reader works, including what breaks.

If you run OrderMyGear, SIPS doesn't read it. SIPS still works as a CRM on its own. Jobs come in by hand, by bulk import, or by paste, and the CRM doesn't care where the work came from.

Paste one of your own commonsku share links and watch the job land. Nothing is stored. Or see what SIPS is.

Next step

Before spirit wear season, pull last year's store clients into one list with the month each one ran. Put a reminder six weeks ahead of each. That list costs you nothing and it's the cheapest revenue you'll find all year.

If you're on commonsku and you want that list to keep itself, start with getting more out of commonsku by connecting it to your pipeline. Or keep collecting sizes off a clipboard photo. Your call. The coach will keep texting either way.

Stout Intel is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by commonsku or OrderMyGear.