Odoo vs. Salesforce Agentforce Commerce vs. Zoho Inventory

Implementation was a terrible experience for us. Because it required a third party, we ended up way over budget and schedule. While Odoo advertises that it works with many systems, these third-party integrations often don't work out of the box and require extensive coding to set up. Furthermore, these "apps" can frequently break or lose integration.

Incentivized

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is well suited for medium to large sized eCommerce platforms (mainly B2C but B2B could work as well) who are looking to streamline their web processes and website functionalities while incorporating multiple departments. If you are a small business and have tighter margins, this may not be the best choice for you as there may not be as many opportunities to utilize all of the CRM's features and you may be at a financial loss because of it. Otherwise, this platform is great for organization and providing a helping hand in your eCommerce roadmap!

Incentivized

Requires a lot of customisation to get started. Very limited customer support, support appeared to not be that knowledgable with issues that aren't the usual issues most users get. Forms aren't optimised for conversions. Zoho offers a lot of features but the depth of its functionality proves limited as our demands increase.

Incentivized

• Possibility to customize the fields and some workflows is rather simple and a lot of tutorials are available on the internet.
• The community version is free as are most modules and some paying modules developped for specific purposes are available in the marketplace.
• It is easy to configure products with accounting, everything is smooth.

Incentivized

• Demandware business manager features a very robust set of options to accomplish many merchandising and content tasks out of the box. For typical retailers, there are usually very simple ways to accomplish common tasks.
• The ability to schedule content and tie unique content to session data is particularly useful and fully featured.
• Many features that would typically be missing from a home-grown CMS and would require development are included in business manager and easily controlled by marketers.

Incentivized

• Tracks which orders have been shipped
• Tracks which orders have been packed
• Tracks with orders have been invoiced
• Works well with Zoho Books

Incentivized

• We had to work with an implementation team to customize Odoo into something that could truly work for us.
• I would like to be able to run some reports in an easier way.
• We did have to implement the use of an iOT box as well for something like printing barcode stickers.

Incentivized

• The #1 pain with Demandware as a developer has been Pipelines. Originally development on this platform was designed as a visual drag, drop, and configure model. You would create these logic flows (pipelines) in the visual editor, made up of nodes (pipelets) and connectors. These quickly got out of hand and turned into a spiderweb. Worse they were not like anything that most developers are used to. Pipelines save to XML but the markup was not clean and difficult to merge or diff, to say the least. I guess they were aiming for a more simple model but quickly realized that was not sufficient for real-world applications. To their credit, Demandware recognized this and has been steadily moving toward a clean, pure-code model.
• The benefits of SaaS and the quick release cycle can be a mixed blessing. Features and API's can and do change from time to time. When you're using a platform like this you cannot build it and forget about it. It's not obvious to everyone but you're signing up for some amount of maintenance over time to keep things up to date.
• The platform has a flaw that still hasn't been resolved. Each Demandware customer "realm" has many instances for development, staging, production, etc. All of the instances have their own user accounts and passwords, and you have to log in to each instance separately. It's very frustrating as an admin or developer, though less so to business users who will only need to access one instance. Demandware could really use a Single Sign On!
• Demandware has a marketplace for third-party extensions to add pre-build integrations with other systems. While there is a reasonably broad selection of third-party vendors, I have to point out that the quality of many of these components has been sub-par. There are a few gems but many are clunky and quickly cobbled together, and surely require further investment of time. Demandware needs to do a better job of quality assurance with third-party vendors.

Incentivized

• Templates within Zoho Inventory are very weak. You can't customize many including package slips, shipment docs, etc...
• When an order has multiple packages, it's next to impossible to find the item you are looking for. Scenario, a large order has many packages and a customer has cancelled one of the items. You must click through every package to find the item, edit the package and remove it before you can cancel the item.
• The reports within Inventory are extremely basic and many of them are useless
• The packing slip module is useless as it does not print out bin locations
• It's an inventory management system but it does not have bin locations
• The backorder system is useless. If you "backorder" something then the whole order is locked until the backorder arrives in. Scenario.... a client orders 20 items, 1 is on backorder. You "backorder" that one item but want to ship the other 19... not possible. The order gets completely locked.
• You can't print out RMA requests. There is just no option to do it, you have to do a screen shot
• Integration with Amazon or other 3rd party e-commerce providers is troublesome.

Incentivized

A huge factor influencing our decision to remain on the Demandware platform is that our new parent company is standardizing all its luxury brands in the US on it. We are fortunate. However, even if we had remained an independent company, I believe we would continue on the Demandware platform for all the reasons outlined in this review. I appreciate the stability the platform has provided to our eCommerce site in the last three years as well as the continuous improvements and technological advances being rolled out that will allow us to keep the site fresh, engaging, modern and stable. I've heard many horror stories from colleagues on other platforms who struggle with the expense and complexity involved with making what should be minor and simple changes and updates to their sites.

It is relatively easy to customise but the problem is sometimes it is not easy to see where this customisation is available. Also the integrations with external systems can prove problematic both during installation and ongoing development and maintenance. It's great for small companies with a simple inventory or even larger organisations with smaller product lines. And it is reasonably priced if you ar eprepared to put the time in.

Incentivized

Once you complete the training with Odoo, you have a great grasp of how the system works, and most every feature is intuitive- There is rarely a task within Odoo that I get frustrated trying to figure out- I can typically look through the system and find what I need to do, and if I ever do need support, the Odoo Support team is excellent

Incentivized

The overall ease of using the system. Consolidation in location for our team members. Mobile application for on the go research, as many of our team members are constantly traveling to job sites or to meet clients. No more duplicate calls to current customers, since we have 12 different divisions that span the company. Mostly the ability to look at the database when our team members begin cultivating a new
lead/prospect with a potential customer to see if anyone within the team has a
relationship with that person or the company they work for.

Incentivized

We have only had one instance where the platform went down in the time we have been using it.

Easy - there is NO SUPPORT (like in ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!!!!!!!). Even for legally mandatory requirements where the system MUST work, they will gladly take a month to get back to you with a NON-answer. We couldn't even get our bank statements correctly into Odoo for 2 months - leading to no reconciliation and the company accounts were a mess (still are!!) as a result - Completely irresponsible. Have not EVEN had an apology from Odoo - they couldn't care less !!

They are very responsive and a support technician will be assigned quickly. Even if there is further clarification needed for the ticket, or a solution is not immediately available, you feel that someone is there and staying on top of the issue. Most common issues are resolved quickly and satisfactorily.

Incentivized

The in-person training was thorough. Trainer was pretty dry, but covered everything really well.

Implementation went fairly smoothly.

Compared to Zoho, I think Odoo lacks some clear ease of use that Zoho provides out of the box. Mainly the easy importation of leads and conversion / tracking. Additionally Zoho analytics is easier to customize the dashboard from the menus. After some tinkering I think you can get the same thing with Odoo, it's language and logic just take some geting used to. Airtable provides similarly easy to customize dashboards that are aesthetically appealing. but lacks the ability to track the customer journey as effectively as Odoo or Zoho systems.

Incentivized

All relative to your organizational size. Shopify works for small to mid, Magento for small to large, commerce tools would be a large-scale plus. Hire a skilled consultant to help you make a decision of this caliber!

Incentivized

The inventory management is better than QuickBooks however you give up an awful lot to get that benefit. The reporting in QuickBooks is far superior. The reporting in Inventory is terrible with every few options to customize the reports. For example, pulling in a salesperson report that factors in returns is not possible. You can't pull a report to see what items need to be picked for all open orders.

Incentivized

• It has helped us improve our purchasing and sales flow, now it is more organized, we can see which product was purchased from which supplier and which price is more convenient, very good
• It helps to manage payments efficiently, and in less time than when it was managed manually, so it is a positive point that we can rescue in our organization.
• In my case, managing inventory helps me more easily locate the most specific products that I require. Currently, we do not have details of mismatches with the products, so my inventory and my stock are kept perfectly updated.

Incentivized

• Salesforce Commerce Cloud ends up paying for itself in the long run so long as customers are taking advantage of its full capabilities.
• I would highly recommend trying it or consulting a partner like us about it if you have an interest and think you could benefit. A thorough business analysis will tell you if this segment of Salesforce is right for your objectives.

Incentivized

• Coming from QuickBooks enterprise with inventory add-on it's an improvement in tracking stock because it restricts so much of what you do.
• Migrating to Inventory was a bit of a nightmare. I'd recommend starting clean or bring as little data as possible.

Incentivized