My Odoo Journey - EXIT 3: The Product Setup

The next stop in my journey, and arguably the most important for B2B businesses: the Product setup. I've helped market and sell products most of my life, so this part of the journey is essential to me. And let me tell you, out-of-the-box, Odoo doesn't disappoint!

The Good

• Easy to create Product Categories and the hierarchy seems limitless
• Product Attributes are easy to add and update
• Optional, Accessory, and Alternative Products can be easily added and are already hooked to sales order creation or web checkout workflows
• Document downloads are built-in and also hooked to sales order creation and product pages
• Publishing products onto the website, adding media like videos to the product page, and showing available inventory on the product page are all easily configured

The Not-So-Good

• Can't reorder the sequence in which Documents appear on the website product page
• Accessory Products should show in the Quotation workflow when its parent product is added as a line item (right now only Optional Products do)
• Alternative Products should show in the Quotation workflow when its parent product is added as a line item and quantity available is not enough

Honestly the Not-So-Good points are me just being picky; I think the functions are probably sufficient for 99% of users out there. But our business would really benefit from having these features. Every quibble comes from features that already exist--it just seems like Odoo created the feature but didn't follow through with making them fully robust.

Creating Product Categories

To me, Product Categories are the most important part of the setup. It's like the foundation you lay when you build a house. A proper category setup allows for a way to manage, slice, and dice your product info and sales performance on the backend. I once met a company who went as far mirroring their GL accounts with their product categories so that they could see performance on their financial statements... you can see how important product categories can be.

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Luckily, in Odoo, setting up categories is a cinch. Just create the Category, assign its Parent, and you're done.

You can create an extensive Parent/Child hierarchy for your categories with ease. With a hierarchy in place, I foresee it will be easy to group up categories to quickly see sales performance in reports. Oddly by default Odoo lists all categories in a flat view, and you can only see the difference by following the slashes "/" that identify their hierarchy. I poked around and found that you can show it in groups which can be expanded. It's a much better view that should have just been the default.

Create the Products (and Build a PIM While You're At It)

You can create an extensive Parent/Child hierarchy for your categories with ease. With a hierarchy in place, I foresee it will be easy to group up categories to quickly see sales performance in reports. Oddly by default Odoo lists all categories in a flat view, and you can only see the difference by following the slashes "/" that identify their hierarchy. I poked around and found that you can show it in groups which can be expanded. It's a much better view that should have just been the default.

"Do the work once and let the entire business benefit, while reducing iterations that lead to errors."

With this in mind, I headed straight for the Attributes tab. This is where I envision setting all the technical specifications of our products, making it the one place we can find all the information we need. At the same time, these attributes will surface on the website product page. I checked it out and what I envision works; however, I couldn't find where I could select which attributes show on the website and which ones stay hidden for backend access/view only.

In all, adding Attributes is easy: you can build them out in a list in the Attributes section, or literally create them on the fly when you're in a product. Attribute management is quick work in Odoo, and this section of the product record can definitely be used as a PIM. To extend on it, I plan to create a custom subtab to further house other product information.

A Bonus: Upsell & Cross-Sell Features

An added bonus to the product record is the Upsell & Cross-Sell section. Odoo clearly had B2C/web experience in mind when creating this. Much like what many of us old school marketers would be used to in Woocommerce , Odoo takes this formula and kicks it up a notch with three choices: Optional Products, Accessory Products, and Alternative Products.

You can see how deeply integrated it is with the website. I was bummed to see that only Optional Products would work on the backend (non-website interaction). If I identify an Optional Product for the main product I am configuring, when this main product is added to a a quote/sales order, a popup will appear for my customer service staff who are entering the order, prompting them to offer an Optional Product. In B2B, this is very important as a lot of our products may require accessories or other parts that a customer would need to install everything successfully. With this function, our team will never forget to suggest these additional products. Pretty cool!

However, it would be cooler if Accessory Products also worked the same way... and wishful thinking would be that the Alternative Product also pops up on order entry, if the original product entered is out of stock. Unlike B2C where customers are emotionally attached to a style or color and simply won't buy if it's unavailable, in B2B, the customer buys on specs and there could always be an alternative available for something that is out of stock that they can swap for.

Now It Feels Like Christmas: The Documents Feature

What really blew me out of the water was the Document feature. I saw a small box on the top of the product record that said Documents. I said to my self, no way! I can upload documents to this product?

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It's true. Every product can have its related products uploaded to its record. I had this in previous implementations, but I needed to use multiple customizations and integrated apps to achieve it. But in Odoo, it's already there and requires three easy steps. And not only does the document stick to the product record, but it also appears on the website on that product's page... and you can even choose to have the document attached to a quote or sales order confirmation you send to your customer. That's an insane functionality for out-of-the-box.

1. Upload the document
2. Select (if you want) where it should be visible at (Quotation, Confirmed Order, Inside Out)
3. Select if it should show on the product's web page as a document to download

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You can see how simple it is:

My only gripe on this one is that you can't reorder the sequence in which the documents appear on the web page.. seems like it shows as LIFO. Hope I'm wrong.

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Publishing to Website Made Easy

Now that my products are created, attributes set, optional products configured, and documents are uploaded... it's time to see this product on a website that's completely powered by Odoo.

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Just click the Go to Website button, and you're there: the product's detail page. And when you're ready to make it live, just flip the Published switch!

Icing On the Cake

Two more features I found that add to the sweetness of Odoo's value prop are the Show Available Quantity and Video functions.

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Price and Availability are the two golden words in B2B, and to show precise Availability of products online for logged in users is very important. Luckily, this is out-of-the-box in Odoo (the verbiage needs a bit of tweaking lol but it's nice to know the function is there).

The other cool feature is the ability to add videos in the product image collection. To this day, something like this is not even out-of-the-box for many platforms, whose names I shall not mention.

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The only shortcoming is that I'm not able to set the video as the first default media for the product. But it would be so cool if I could.

I really can go on... but honestly, what I have covered is an impressive set of features offered by Odoo that require no special integrations or costly module upgrades. It's truly an exciting time for clients like us who are obsessed with process efficiency... till the next Exit!