Selling online has become an unavoidable channel for most French companies, whether B2C or B2B. Rather than stacking an e-commerce platform on one side and an ERP on the other, Odoo offers an integrated approach. This article walks you through the practical steps to start an online store with Odoo and the points to watch.
Enabling the E-commerce Module
Odoo's e-commerce module is built on the Website module. You install both, and the visual editor gains specific blocks: product grid, detailed product page, cart, checkout flow, customer portal.
The first concrete step is to structure your catalog. If you do not yet have an Odoo catalog, you must create your products, with their characteristics, photos, prices and descriptions. If your catalog already exists, you specify which products can be published on the website, in which category, and with which main photo.
Generally allow between five and fifteen days for a clean go-live, depending on the size of your catalog and the complexity of your variants (sizes, colors, configurations).
Variants: An Often Underestimated Point
If you sell products with variants, pay particular attention to them. A T-shirt in six sizes and four colors represents twenty-four potential stock references. Odoo handles this complexity elegantly: you create a single template product, define its attributes (size, color), and the tool automatically generates the variants.
For each variant, you can manage a specific stock, a specific price and specific photos. On the website, the display shows the template product with selectors that switch the visible characteristics.
Our advice: spend half a day at the start of the project formalizing your catalog's attribute grid. It is the investment that makes everything else smooth afterwards.
The Checkout Flow and Payment
The Odoo checkout flow runs in several steps: cart review, customer identification (existing account or sign-up), choice of delivery address, choice of carrier, choice of payment method, final confirmation. Each step is customizable.
For payment, Odoo natively integrates several gateways: Stripe, Adyen, PayPal, Mollie, GoCardless. You choose the ones that suit you according to your target, your volume and your risk management policy. Our advice to get started: Stripe for card and SEPA payment, possibly complemented by Mollie for European customers outside the euro zone.
If you sell B2B, also plan for the "deferred invoicing" payment method, which generates an invoice to be paid by bank transfer. And if some customers are eligible for a prepaid account or granted credit, configure the corresponding rules in the Accounting module.
Delivery and Carriers
For delivery, Odoo offers two approaches. The first is manual rate configuration: you define the costs yourself based on weight, order amount, or geographic zone. It is simple and suited to small organizations.
The second is a direct connection to carriers' APIs. Odoo natively supports Chronopost, Colissimo, Mondial Relay, DPD, UPS, FedEx, DHL. This integration lets you retrieve rates in real time, print labels from Odoo, and automatically send tracking numbers to customers.
For returns, Odoo handles the standard procedure: the customer reports a return from their portal, the merchant receives the request, accepts or refuses it, generates a return label, and stock is updated when the parcel is received. For high-volume merchants, these features save customer service a considerable amount of time.
International Taxation
If you sell to European customers outside France, you are subject to the EU one-stop shop (OSS) scheme above ten thousand euros of annual intra-community revenue. Odoo handles this taxation automatically: the VAT applied to the cart is that of the customer's delivery country, and the quarterly OSS return is extracted directly from the accounting.
For sales outside the European Union, tax calculation is disabled and delivery will be subject to customs duties on entry into the destination country. You specify this in your terms and conditions of sale.
SEO and User Experience
For an online store to generate revenue, people must be able to find it and enjoy using it. On the search engine optimization side, Odoo includes the basics: titles and meta descriptions per product, clean URLs, sitemap, and schema.org structured data for products. Our advice: do not underestimate the time to spend on product descriptions. A rich, original, customer-benefit-oriented description improves both search ranking and conversion rate.
On the user experience side, polish your product pages (several photos from different angles, clear description, readable price, displayed availability, visible add-to-cart button). Polish the checkout flow (short steps, no requests for unnecessary information, a variety of payment options). And polish the customer portal (visible order tracking, downloadable invoices, order history).
Advanced Features Worth Knowing
Beyond the standard, Odoo offers several features worth knowing for a serious online store: related-product recommendations and cross-selling, loyalty program with points, promo codes and discount vouchers, abandoned cart email reminders, product comparison, wishlists. These features are activated as the site matures and your volumes grow.
Conclusion
Odoo's e-commerce module is complete enough to serve as the main platform for a majority of French merchant SMEs. The strength of the model remains the native integration with the rest of the ERP, which eliminates re-keying and discrepancies. For very specific or very high-volume projects, additional development may be needed, but the standard covers the vast majority of cases.