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Fixing Issues With Shopify by Using Odoo. Ecommerce has been a booming experience for worldwide consumers for the past 20 years. However, the COVID-19 pandemic and exploding technological advancements have brought ecommerce to centre stage. Due to extended and multiple worldwide rounds of lockdowns, the home delivery and online shopping business have taken off. Currently, ecommerce sale amounts to $5.2 trillion worldwide which is forecasted to grow up to $8.1 trillion by 2026.
An industry of such a massive scale is difficult to be served by a few large corporations such as Amazon and Alibaba and therefore needs local ecommerce platforms such as Shopify and Odoo ERP. These ecommerce platforms bring their own set of issues and therefore cause many unintentional problems to online shoppers. In this article, we’ll look at a few problems found in Shopify, and try to see how these problems are resolved or mitigated by Odoo ERP.
Issues With Shopify and Their Solution by Odoo
Shopify has done a good job of presenting a platform for ecommerce sellers. However, it lacks many crucial features which hinder the growth and popularity of the platform. Despite the feature’s importance and crucial nature, they are not unsolvable. Many platforms such as Odoo ERP can effectively remedy these issues. Below we list some issues that are found in Shopify, and are resolved by Odoo ERP:
Everything, Everywhere, All at once
Shopify takes a tremendous task upon itself of providing a feasible, comfortable, all-inclusive solution to online selling in the form of ecommerce and presents a solution that it is trying its best to keep together. It has been so forth able to accomplish a good number of milestones by including major components of ecommerce as part of its ecosystems such as inventory, customer, analytics, and marketing. However, the extensive nature of the ecommerce model, makes the Shopify interface extremely difficult with a steep learning curve. Each of the tabs in the Shopify system creates a plethora of information that is important, however, is extremely messy and difficult to extract useful insights from them.
Odoo solves these problems effectively and creates a crystal-clean system that can provide more information in a cleaner and more organized manner. The modules in Odoo are better integrated and provide significantly more user-related data with better and in-depth information extracts compared to the Shopify system. The reports, inventory, shipping, and customer service are all present in an organized manner in Odoo ERP and are more sophisticated than Shopify.
Finance and Tax Assessment and Reporting
Finance and taxes are important parts of businesses. When it comes to handling financial obligations in a corporate environment, a good system that works promptly is extremely important. For ecommerce, business matters do not end with the matters of customer and product only. The financial and taxes are extremely important aspects and Shopify significantly lacks the finance and taxes modules or similar add-ons to accommodate these needs efficiently and in a trustable manner. For a business that aims to be digital first (ecommerce), agile, and customer-oriented, not being able to pay taxes, and get the financial reports promptly can be proven fatal.
Since Odoo has a clearer and better understanding of all the needs of the business’s operations, the modules provided therein are well-suited for ecommerce. There are many modules in Odoo ERP that are available to fulfil exactly the needs that an ecommerce system may ask for. Some of the prominent modules in Odoo ERP arsenal to solve the taxation, and finance problems (in the context of ecommerce) include Accounting, Sales, Point of Sale, Inventory, Timesheets, and Website.
Technical Capability Expansion
Shopify store management is doubtlessly an excellent tool in itself, and nobody can deny that. But does it cover all major aspects of ecommerce store management from source management to customer and finance management, which is needed by online sellers, is a wholly different yet important question. While Shopify supports many apps to extend its capability, the expansion capability of Shopify is extremely limited due to the restricted nature of Shopify app store app development and publishing. Due to this, ecommerce store management through Shopify can become hectic and is often cost-inefficient.
The Odoo ERP solves the expansion capability problem effectively in almost an overkill manner. First, the Odoo ERP has provided an extensive range of modules (thorough and more capable than Apps) which effectively solves all the needed capabilities for an ecommerce store. Secondly, the Odoo app store has a huge range of independent app developers who strive to provide the capability which may be missing but needed to run a successful ecommerce store. Finally, the extensive number of partners linked with official Odoo ERP can create even custom apps or features needed for particular cases of the ecommerce store.
Conclusion
Shopify is an ecommerce company that enables various websites to build ecommerce capability built into the website. Shopify is widely adopted by various websites due to its streamlined functionalities. However, their many issues found in Shopify which can cause problems for web developers. Most importantly the Shopify ecommerce platform has a messy system which makes it difficult to extract the necessary customer and product information. Shopify also has technical limitations due to limited customization and expansion options available to Shopify customers. Lastly, Shopify does not have any mechanism to populate, arrange, or generate external financial documents for the ecommerce store.
The Odoo ERP solves these issues effectively. The system has built-in as well as external modules to help with the financial documents, technical expansion capabilities, and managing the clutter effectively. Overall Odoo ERP resolves issues found in Shopify quite effectively. Having Odoo integrated with Shopify can provide the best of both worlds without sacrificing the good things in each of these platforms.