Comparing Steersman’s Odoo E-Commerce with Akretion’s ShopInvader

The team at Steersman released the first online store, running on our proprietary server infrastructure and our custom Odoo e-commerce technology bundle, in February 2020, over four years after the concept was created.

Steersman e-commerce business suite includes a multitude of components/microservices. It operates as a cohesive, fully integrated suite for e-commerce/content presentation, sales, payment collection, supply chain management, production, accounting, and more (similar to another technology bundle, Shop Invader e-commerce for Odoo, which is reviewed in more detail below). All designed and packaged for small businesses that are serious about their efficiency, web capabilities, and quality of user experience.

Using Odoo Enterprise as the ERP core of our all-in-one e-commerce business system for the USA, we added several proprietary modules designed for companies that value strong e-commerce capabilities, bringing complete management into Odoo:

• Powerful PIM module for managing and organizing catalog information, including tools and reports for faceted filter cleanup
• Shipping module compatible with multiple parcel carriers and designed for estimating and processing US and international shipping for online retailers
• CMS with theming and templating capabilities for a variety of page types
• PCI-compliant US-style payment processing (credit cards, PayPal, ACH)
• …and more

Similarities and differences between Steersman e-commerce and ShopInvader for Odoo

Taking Odoo as the core and building an advanced e-commerce system on top of it is not a unique idea, although few companies have developed it into a working system like Steersman did.

Upon review, Odoo ShopInvader has some similarities with the Steersman Business Suite in its concepts and components – both use Odoo for the e-commerce ERP (for inventory, accounting, purchasing, CRM, order management, and fulfillment), add on CMS functionality with SEO tools, a powerful search engine, and a way to customize the online store.

According to the ShopInvader documentation as of this time, the architecture of Shop Invader for Odoo includes LocomotiveCMS as the website component of the package, which is used for managing website content. Steersman, on the other hand, focuses on comprehensive management of content within the Odoo instance – products, pages, blog articles, and other content, including images, are all managed within Odoo, with no additional CMS required and maintained.

Although the content management systems differ, both the Steersman Odoo e-commerce suite and ShopInvader utilize Elasticsearch as the data engine for the catalog, enabling advanced, high-performance faceted filtering of product category pages, enhanced website search functionality, and more. Shop Invader also allows the use of Algolia as a search provider (Algolia provides search as a paid service), effectively allowing two options.

Both systems work with a CDN and allow layout and styling overrides. Both feed the shopping cart and product information to/from Odoo. However, whereas ShopInvader is a complex bundle released “open source” that companies can try to implement on their own, Steersman’s Odoo e-commerce business suite is provided “as a service” within the Steersman infrastructure, with Steersman providing complete maintenance, support and management of the systems - performance, up-time and stability being part of the subscription.

To explore further

For a live store running on the Steersman e-commerce suite for Odoo, check out LegionSafety.com. For example, pages with multiple faceted filters and attribute mapping can be found on their respirator cartridges and hearing protection.

Check out the ShopInvader for Odoo documentation here.

If you’d like to learn more about Steersman and our Odoo e-commerce all-in-one ERP, please fill out the contact form on our website or contact us via email or phone email/call.

Other Steersman articles on related themes:

• Common issues with scaling business software in growing SMBs
• On-site search technologies 101
• Functional requirements to integrate an online store with a separate inventory management system
• What marketers and users want from e-commerce on-site search
• Benefits of PIM (product information management) systems for online catalogs

By Andrey Kolesnikov, business development manager at Steersman