Being an Official Partner of Odoo, Fingent has always catered to the needs of various customers and streamlined their operations, thus saving their costs, time, and resources. In this post, you will see how Odoo ERP implementation helps retail management.

Odoo ERP: A Highly Customizable Cloud-based Platform for Retailers!

The retail industry is one of the primary beneficiaries of digital transformation. In 2010, eCommerce accounted for only 5-6% of the aggregate retail sales in the US. The industry has witnessed phenomenal growth over the past decade with the development and adoption of retail technology, ERPs, eCommerce applications, custom retail solutions, and stiff market competition. At present, online retail sales in the US account for 21% of the total retail purchases. Isn’t that mind-blowing?

The paradigm shift from the traditional operating landscape to a digital world presents both opportunities and challenges. Many people look for products online, make buying decisions based on social media reviews, and order products to be delivered home. They even use the internet to search local shops, order online and collect from nearby stores (click & collect) or find retailers that offer discounts in their area. The message is clear: physical/ in-store retailing also needs to pace up with the change.  

To overcome the challenges in managing physical and digital selling, retailers need to adopt a modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

Read more: 5 Reasons to Integrate Your E-commerce Application with Odoo ERP

Today, ERP is extensively used to simplify and automate customer relationship management, project management, accounting, compliance, inventory, and supply chain operations. ERP is a reliable investment for business owners as they can control and monitor their operations, get reports, and gain insights on consumer behavior and market situations.  

Odoo ERP for Retail Management

ERP software allows integrating the core processes to run a company in one place, such as finance, manufacturing, HR, supply chain, inventory, procurement, tracking, transactions, etc. It also integrates all the data and related business processes of an organization. 

Odoo ERP is a popular, open-source, cloud-based business management software that helps manage various business needs such as manufacturing, finance, inventory, point of sale (POS), eCommerce, purchase, logistics, etc. Odoo is an intelligent ERP system that allows retailers to integrate their whole data and all the processes associated with the retail industry. For retailers, Odoo is a perfect choice that increases profit and enhances productivity as it provides comprehensive solutions that can seamlessly integrate with eCommerce.

Read more: 5 signs which imply that your business needs Odoo ERP

How Odoo ERP Benefits Retail Management

Following are the significant benefits of using Odoo ERP in retail:

1. One-step checkout 

In online shopping apps, the checkout stage tends to have several processes spread across different web pages. This can put off some customers who don’t want to spend their time navigating through each. Odoo eliminates these multiple processes by offering a one-step checkout that is fast, convenient, and intuitive. It has the potential to reduce checkout abandonment and thereby increase sales.

2. Craft stunning product pages

For eCommerce websites, high-quality product pages are crucial to gain maximum traction. Long descriptions with dull-looking pages are outdated. Odoo ERP lets you build beautiful and stunning product pages with a simple drag and drop feature. You can also customize your online store’s look, layout, color, and theme with Odoo and make last-minute changes to meet the demands and expectations of your clients. You can also make changes and enhancements at regular intervals to add more features to your store. Make sure that your digital store is mobile responsive to be compatible with the changes and new features.

3. Payment module integration

Having different payment options can enhance the customer experience. With Odoo’s plugins and extensions, retailers can integrate and customize various modules like wallets, cryptocurrencies, credit and debit cards, and UPI. It also supports PayPal, PayUMoney, Buckaroo, Sips, Stripe, Ingenico, Adyen, and Authorize.net.

4. Sales, purchase, and finance management

Odoo offers non-retail and retail companies different sales management processes. Odoo has a Point of Sale (POS) module, which is integrated with the sales and inventory module. This module helps retailers track stock and commodities in real-time. The module also allows for the use of biometric devices to log in and out. It’s compatible with any hardware and doesn’t require installation. What’s more, the POS remains operational even when offline.

Read more: How Odoo ERP Simplifies Sales Management in Your Organization

5. Inventory management

It’s a known fact that inventory management in a volatile and dynamic consumer goods market is an arduous task for many retailers. With several issues such as excess inventory or out-of-stock scenarios, inefficient inventory management processes result in financial loss and lead many retailers to bankruptcy. 

Odoo ERP offers inventory management as its integral feature, where it stores details of an organization’s entire inventory, including the individual product details. Odoo enables retail managers to keep track of crucial information such as:

• The present status of the inventory
• Items that will run out of stock
• Shelf life details of each product
• Notifications related to product expiry
• Ability to make demand forecasts based on past trends and customers’ online behavior and buying habits

Odoo ERP enables retailers to gain a competitive edge by modifying inventory to meet the fluctuating customer demands.

Read more: Fingent’s new plugin facilitates the scheduling of Zoom meetings from Odoo! 

6. Manufacturing and production

Retailers who are also engaged in manufacturing and production can use Odoo’s module to help run functions. The Manufacturing module can assist in creating bills of materials (BoMs), managing semi-finished products, subcontracting manufacturing, etc. It can also help in configuring work centers and managing and configuring kits.

7. The Cloud Advantage

• Odoo solutions are cloud-based, allowing retailers to access their e-commerce stores from anywhere in the world. 
• Odoo is flexible, customizable, and scalable, making it especially ideal for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). 
• Odoo is an affordable ERP solution with the maintenance fees included in the license fee.

In a nutshell, Odoo ERP serves as a high-performance retail management system where retailers can manage everything on a single system. It can bring tremendous benefits to the retailing industry. They can integrate Odoo’s various business apps such as Sales, Accounting, Customer relationship management (CRM), Inventory, etc., with Odoo e-commerce. 

The Odoo App Store features nearly 10,000 apps that connect to the same database on Odoo’s own servers. A testament to Odoo’s popularity is in the numbers: it has more than 5 million users worldwide, from start-ups to large enterprises. 

With a simple checkout process, robust customer portal (order tracking, advanced shipping rules, and return management), order review, and wish lists, Odoo ERP provides real-time information to users.

Read more: Why Choose Fingent as Your Odoo ERP Partner

Fingent has an ace team of Odoo developers that offers consulting, development, and implementation services. Whether you want to integrate Odoo ERP with your existing e-commerce store or build an online store from scratch powered by Odoo integration, give us a call right away.       

As the business environment becomes hyper-competitive, more businesses are finding value in mobile and web apps to boost customer engagement. Apps enable the marketer to deliver a solid mobile presence, with customized interfaces geared specifically to provide customers with the best possible experience. Apps streamline the customer’s buying process, automate many routine tasks, and enable new possibilities, to drive engagement better.

Catering to the Growing Customer Preferences

More and more marketers now roll out customer facing apps, to remain engaged with their customers always, enabling customers to buy from anywhere, and at any time.

Any debate on whether today’s businesses require customer facing apps is settled by the fact 2.6 billion people across the globe now have high-powered mobile devices within their arm’s reach, at all times. Black Friday sales through mobile devices crossed the One billion dollar mark in 2016, indicating the preference of online shoppers to use their mobile devices for the buying process.

A good success story exemplifying the growing customer preference is Domino’s Pizza. The pizza giant’s new mobile app for customers to order delivery or in-store pickup of their food in the UK resulted in increase of e-commerce sales by 24.4%, and 52% of online coming in through mobile devices. The app has been downloaded more than 10 million times. Many customers prefer using the app rather than go through the painstaking process of calling up the store.

Leveraging the Power of Push and Pull Notification

As the adage goes, “out of sight, out of mind.” When a customer downloads an app, it remains on the phone, strengthening brand recognition. Regular visibility and interactions between the brand and the customer boost trust, so essential for transactions to take place.

A big advantage of the app is the ability to send push and in-app notifications to users. Such notifications, served virtually on a captive audience, influence the customer and deliver high success rates, as long as the notifications result in relevant and valuable content. The more the audience listens to the brand, the more they are likely to respond to marketing offers and chose the brand offerings when in need.

Push and in-app notifications are invaluable to inform users, especially younger demographics, of new products and offers. Most marketers use these options to reach out to customers proactively, with personalized offers. The best practice is to serve personalized recommendations based on factors such as most recent purchase, or the location of the user, offering direct value to users and warming them to the app experience. Generic push notifications are widely regarded as the junk mail of the mobile world, and may just push the user to uninstall the app.

Push notifications are also a great tool to counter cart abandonment. Sending instant push and in-app messaging, when the customer abandons the cart, enticing them with added offers, may be instrumental in changing their mind, and increase the likelihood of immediate conversion.

In-app messaging is proven to increase engagement by 26%. About 65% of users return to the app within a month, if push notifications are enabled.

Leverage Location-based Content

Beacon-based location marketing is now increasingly becoming attractive as a great way to boost customer engagement on mobile devices.

Smart marketers leverage beacon and geofencing technology to send location specific, contextual, and timely data-driven content to customers. They use beacons to push location-based offers and promotions, promote loyalty programs, and facilitate mobile-based proximity payments. Customers prefer such engagement, as evident from a survey by Aimia and Columbia Business School, where 69% of them agreed to share location data to receive location-based discounts.

The 2016 Coachella music and arts festival was path-breaking in the sense it sends out location-based notifications about artists and vendors to attendees. It also introduced a “Surprise and Delight” rewards program, rewarding attendees who synced their American Express Cards to the event’s iOS app. The event also provided beacon enabled mobile payments to attendees, doing away with the need for a physical wallet.

Pew Research Center estimates nine out of ten users in the United States enabling location services on their mobile phones.

Gamifying and Incentivizing the Experience

Promoting mobile-based loyalty programs increase customer engagement and bridge the gap between a brand’s online and physical presence. People love incentives, and rewards offer a good reason for them to come back to the app.

Apps make it easier to administer loyalty programs and deliver the associated rewards. The core of any loyalty program is customers getting reward points for every interaction with the brand. When customers see, their points adding up, they come to shop again. When such rewards are combined with gamification or points for any action done through the app, engagement is sure to increase manifold.

Starbucks is probably the most well-known brand having perfected the art of offering big rewards exclusively to app customers. The ‘My Starbucks’ rewards program allows customers to use the app to make pre-orders, custom orders, receive free upgrades and special discounts, based on their loyalty status. Enabling in-app payment speeds up the transaction, and increase convenience.

Leveraging the Power of Analytics

The spin off benefit of customers using apps is gaining valuable data for analytics. Structuring the app engagement, the right way delivers a ton of analytics on how users interact with the app.

App based engagement and transactions emit data, which subject to analytics, shed invaluable light on understanding the customer better. Such data can also be the basis for business and strategic decisions, as in how to position the product, adopt marketing pitches with greater success rate, and more.

However, analytics is still underestimated and underutilized to enrich the customer experience. Smart brands now leverage real time analytics to enrich the customer’s buying experience. One possibility in this front is helping customers get additional live information about the products they browse or short list for purchase. An associated possibility is gathering interesting and offbeat information associated with the project, such as a list of celebrities using the same product, showing some fun facts associated with the project, and more. Mobile and web apps make it considerably easier to deliver such information to the customer, in a seamless and non-intrusive way.

Another underestimated potential is leveraging the big data generated by apps to collaborate with other popular platforms. A good trendsetter in this front is Shazam, the leading music discovery app. Shazam for Brands’ leverages accumulated user data and brand advertisements to identify the best artist and musical genres for brands and create specific and customized ad units to drive customer engagement.

Deep Linking to In-App Content

The ever-prevalent social networks allow marketers to share their content and gain an even larger audience. Apps offer an additional and more robust option in this direction. Allowing users share their experiences inside the app increases the popularity of the app, and lead to more users downloading it, delivering multiplier effects.

Deep linking, to content within an app, makes it possible to share in-app content easily. The spin off benefit is keeping existing customers engaged within the app, improving retention rates and enhancing the user experience.

A good benchmark to emulate is the Nike+ Run Club app, which allows sharing the in-app content to social media platforms.

With marketing now a high-stakes game, intuitively designed mobile and web apps become a valuable source of competitive advantage. Marketers who identify their customer’s path to engagement and purchasing, and use the app to optimize the journey comes out on top.