A constant rise in demands of eCommerce has seen global startups and small to medium-level retail businesses joining the current bandwagon of going digital. This exponential growth has seen more and more owners globally who are up and coming with extremely innovative ideas and trends to sell their products and services.
Today, we talk about two tremendously powerful eCommerce platforms, Magento 2 and Odoo, and their integration opening up seamless opportunities for eCommerce platform owners. Later, we will learn with Odoo-Magento integration, how businesses can achieve an omnichannel approach to eCommerce, providing a consistent and personalized experience for customers, whether they are shopping online or in-store.
Brief on Magento 2 and Odoo Platforms
We all totally understand the fact that custom business requirements make every eCommerce app development project unique. Based on the project scope, app architecture is designed, and a technology stack is selected to build one. This is a critical step to decide on running this platform for the future. This is why you should contact a trusted eCommerce development company to build your next eCommerce applications.
Magento-2 is highly recommended to build eCommerce applications that require a wider range of feature sets and customization. Moreover, Magento 2 platform offers both, open-source with limited functionalities and Magento Commerce, used as a PaaS by enterprises. With 3500+ Magento extensions available to extend the functionalities, your next eCommerce application is sorted by hiring Magento developers.
Odoo ERP, on the other hand, is a complete software suite that offers modules like CRM, ERP, eCommerce, Finance & Accounting, POS, Manufacturing, Warehousing, Inventory Management, Project Management, etc. Odoo ERP is an all-in-one software suite that claims to be the best for SMEs to optimize their daily operations.
Odoo’s paid version is significantly cost-effective compared to other highly expensive competitors like SAP, Oracle Netsuite, and Microsoft Navision.
Odoo-Magento 2 Integration
The eCommerce businesses can leverage seamless benefits by effective Odoo Magento 2 integration using Odoo-Magento 2 Connector. This is to sync stores, products, categories, customers, orders, invoices, inventory, sales data, and more.
A feature list of Odoo Magento integration is shown below:
•Bidirectional product sync.
•Bidirectional category sync.
•Real-time product and product categories sync from Magento to Odoo.
•Sync of Magento configurable products as Odoo variants.
•Real-time order sync from Magento to Odoo.
•Bidirectional order status update.
•Auto-generation of order invoice in Odoo when the order is invoiced in Magento.
•Customer sync from Magento to Odoo.
•Real-time inventory sync.
•Tax Mapping.
•Payment mapping.
•Shipping carrier mapping.
•The delivery for the order gets automatically done at Odoo’s end when the order gets shipped at Magento’s end.
•Automatic synchronization of Tracking Id to Magento from Odoo once delivery for an order is generated in Odoo.
•Compatible with Odoo POS, inventory will automatically sync at both ends, Magento and Odoo, during order/delivery at Magento or POS.
What is Multichannel vs Omnichannel in eCommerce?
To understand the omnichannel experience, it is necessary to know about the key differences between two traditional methodologies: Multichannel and Omnichannel. Let us understand both in brief with examples.
Multichannel eCommerce
Multichannel integration produces cash flows from different sources and devices. Basically, these are various forms of customer touch points from where the revenue is generated.
Multichannel helps retail owners to optimize each channel themselves. Multichannel eCommerce, as the name suggests, provides multiple channels for a single customer. However, the drawback is that no sync is established between any two or more channels which results into a disjointed customer experience.
The multichannel strategy has all independent channels with different operations. For example, you have a shop and an online store, but working separately.
Omnichannel eCommerce
On the contrary, the omnichannel approach focuses more on enhancing selling and buying experiences by putting customers at the core. All eCommerce retail businesses must consider following omnichannel to ensure customers shall have the same experience regardless of channel or platform. Retail owners use an omnichannel strategy to retain existing customers more instead of finding new ones, increase the brand’s visibility, loyalty, enhance customer service, web traffic, and in-store sales.
Picture this: You walk into an Apple store, looking at a range of products, and asking their customer assistants all the questions you wanted to ask. Now you’re ready to buy an iPad and you can do that easily from a mobile device, there and then. This is omnichannel eCommerce delivering seamless shopping experiences for the customers.
Why Odoo ERP Integration is the Backbone of Omnichannel Strategy? - The Benefits
Today, there are still a lot of small businesses around the globe that are stubborn to try new technologies. Small businesses definitely are not set up to sell across more channels as they may fear the complexity of adding multiple channels. But omnichannel eCommerce is not about complexity, it is all about delivering a complete buying experience to the customers.
Let us have a look at the benefits of Odoo integration with Magento-powered or any other custom-built eCommerce store.
1. Odoo Flushes the Conservative Retail Approach of SMEs
There is still a stigma running in the eCommerce community to use diverse software applications to meet diverse business aspects. This results in a significantly costly affair. The worse part is yet to come, what if these multiple software systems running eCommerce businesses are not communicating with each other, or simply are incompatible with each other? Found yourself in a pickle, didn’t you? This situation puts the error-free data transfer process in danger.
A robust ERP solution like Odoo could be a savior to overcome such shortcomings as you can implement custom modules based on your need and pay for used modules only. Moreover, seamless integration of all your business processes and systems with Odoo with eliminate all the dangers of incompatibility, error-prone data transfer, and human errors.
With 40+ proven and insight-driven eCommerce industry-grade applications, Odoo supports every need. From creating a beautiful professional website, managing customer relations, planning and launching your marketing strategies, managing accounts, and monitoring and managing your inventory, it does it all. It is also possible to integrate third-party applications into Odoo, i.e. online portals, POS systems, mobile apps, analytics, and backend operations.
2. Full Control to the eCommerce Owners
Omnichannel integration with Odoo fits the bill perfectly for eCommerce applications. An open-source module integrates with Odoo CRM and Odoo ERP systems to empower eCommerce businesses to gain full control over their online stores. Leveraging Odoo for omnichannel integration helps customers to take control of their environments. This gives you a competitive advantage over your competitors to choose your platform.
3. Versatile Odoo POS Saves Bucks
Odoo POS is also known as an All-in-One, Centralized, or One-Stop POS as it perfectly compliments the omnichannel strategy for eCommerce business operations. It is simple, faster, reliable, and offers super-rich functionality and features. Odoo POS can be flexible and affordable for SMEs as well as enterprises.
4. Efficient CRM Making Customer Management Easy
Always stay updated about the clients’ purchases of the present and past. Precise information will help in analyzing, planning, and implementing the next marketing strategy. It is also possible to customize the CRM to meet the exact requirements of your sales team.
Those are big advantages for retailers battling to survive in today’s chaotic business environments—benefits you can ignore if you’re a retailer.
5. Effective Inventory Management
An all-in-one and robust POS system is the most important module in the supply chain management (SCM) process. An Odoo POS will help eCommerce business owners to track on-hand and sold inventory in order to provide accurate stock totals.
Going digital is not a solution on its own as it could cause a lot of headaches if you do not choose the right eCommerce development partners. Inventory management could be an expensive, time-consuming, and hectic affair as there could be hundreds of product variants depending on the size, color, taste, material, volume, etc. The good thing is that databases can provide a serial number to track each product and version that is similar to bin locations, helping the warehouse staff to identify the locations of the ordered products.
Product categorization is the key to effective inventory management as it is done considering the name, brand, supplier, SKU, color, origin, etc.
Final Takeaways
Employing an omnichannel eCommerce strategy can help Startups and SMEs to simplify and streamline processes, increase customer retention, build brand awareness, and omnipresence. Omnichannel integration using Odoo ERP will consider all the possible channels that customers may utilize in their buying journeys. Odoo could be used by those who already have an established eCommerce platform and need to scale up or those who simply have physical brick-and-mortar businesses.
However, as a business owner, you must understand the omnichannel strategy first. The attentiveness of your customer support staff needs to be evaluated and revised. Custom or personalized mobile applications could also be developed in order to gather end-user data, engage with them effectively, and plan your social media campaigns/activities.
If there is a hole somewhere in the created ecosystem, contact the right eCommerce application development company that has a proven track record in delivery of robust eCommerce solutions. You can also hire Odoo developers or Magento developers to build a powerful eCommerce platform from scratch.
Top comments (1)
I really enjoyed reading your blog I think integration is a great way to improve your Magento store and provide your customers with a better shopping experience. If you're considering integrating Magento with Odoo, I recommend to hire Magento certified developers to help you with the process. They can help you choose the right integration solution for your needs and ensure that the integration is implemented correctly.