Cogsy forecasts inventory. Vendlore closes the loop with supplier, restock auto-fire, and a weekly per-channel profit report.

Cogsy ships reorder suggestions and inventory health — that's the shape of its reporting depth. A per-channel contribution-margin P&L is not the standard report. Vendlore ships the second question every Monday: revenue minus COGS, shipping, fees, fulfillment, and attributed ad spend — per storefront and per ad channel — ranked so the channel that earns the most per dollar sits at the top and the channel that bleeds sits at the bottom.

Both tools answer real questions. Cogsy answers "when should this SKU reorder and how much?" — reorder and inventory. Vendlore answers "which storefront actually made money this week?" — the per-channel profit & loss. The Cogsy alternative positioning is straightforward: if your top decision is the Monday channel P&L, Vendlore ships it; if your top decision is reorder timing alone, Cogsy stays a credible fit.

Reorder suggestions need a human to act on them. Vendlore's restock auto-fire closes the loop without that hand-off: per-SKU reorder decisions travel straight through the operator's pre-approved channel — Slack, email, EDI/EDI-X12, or a custom webhook — with approval mode kept as the fallback for SKUs the operator wants to gate. When a drop in cover crosses an operator-configurable threshold, a reorder PO fires; the days-of-cover picture and the pending-PO picture reconcile live.

Cogsy is built around reorder suggestions: it tells the operator what to reorder and when. Auto-fire against the supplier is not a first-class mode in the same way. The Cogsy alternative framing is the closed loop — the operator's PO is generated, routed and reconciled against supplier ETA without a hand-off between "decision" and "delivery". Vendlore is the Cogsy alternative that closes that loop.

Static supplier lead times lie. Vendlore carries a live ETA profile per supplier, refreshed against carrier updates, ASN arrivals and historical variance — so reorder math runs against the actual lead time, not the one printed on the supplier sheet six months ago. When the ETA drifts up, the next reorder decision knows about it; when variance tightens, the next reorder decision knows about that, too — and the restock auto-fire step uses the live number, not the stale one.

Cogsy keeps suppliers as static profiles: the lead time entered at vendor setup is the lead time the reorder math uses, until the operator edits it. The Cogsy alternative positioning is the live signal — Vendlore treats every supplier as its own live signal that re-runs the next reorder decision against the actual lead time. Both products optimize reorder timing; Vendlore optimizes it against a number the supplier sheet can't lie about.