Bridging Odoo and Shopify: 3 Takeaways from dear digital's afterwork event

On 27 November, we hosted an afterwork session bringing together merchants, operators, and curious newcomers who wanted to understand how to get more out of their commerce stack. The goal? Create a space where people could ask the questions they never get to ask during formal demos or sales calls and get honest, experience-based answers.

Instead of answering top-down, we invited participants to raise their hands, add context, and share their experiences. And they did, extensively!

Attendees were helping each other, sharing what had worked for them, what had broken, and what they wished they’d known earlier. We've summarized the three most important takeaways. 

1. Odoo x Shopify integration is powerful, but the devil is in the details 

This was, without question, the hottest topic of the night! The consensus?
The integration can work extremely well, but small configuration choices can make or break the sync.

Some examples discussed:

• Inventory rules that accidentally override Shopify availability
• Product variant mismatches
• Accounting configurations that cause failed synchronizations
• Automations in Odoo interfering with order flows

If you want to avoid that - read our latest blogpost about the 7 most overlooked challenges when integrating Shopify and Odoo. 

2. Sendcloud works great... but fees made people question alternatives

Several merchants highlighted that they use Sendcloud for parcel shipping. Everyone agreed that the integration works smoothly, it’s stable and the UI is clear and easy-to-use. But: the commission fees hurt, especially for growing businesses

This sparked a group discussion if there's a cheaper alternative available, yet with a comparable reliability. So far, no clear winner emerged.

3. We need best practices, not just features

Many attendees weren’t just looking for tool explanations. They wanted process clarity:

• “How should inventory flow ideally work?”
• “Which system should be the single source of truth?”
• “How much should live in Shopify vs. Odoo?”
• “How do I avoid breaking things as I scale?”