# Deep dive met Sam & Chris | Shopify of Odoo? De juiste keuze

In deze aflevering gaan Sam en Chris, beiden Solution Architect bij Dear Digital, in op een vraag die veel groeiende bedrijven bezighoudt: 'Moet ik kiezen voor Shopify, Odoo, of misschien wel allebei?'

Ze vergelijken de kernfilosofieën van de twee platforms. Shopify als een best-of-breed verkoopsysteem gericht op snelheid, checkout en multi-channel commerce, en Odoo als een alles-in-één ERP dat voorraad, inkoop, productie en meer aanstuurt.

Chris benadrukt de kracht van Odooop het gebied van operations en native app-integratie, terwijl Sam de evolutie van Shopifynaar een robuuste storefront met sterke analyses, orderrouting en headless opties zoals Hydrogen uitlegt. Samen duiken ze in frontend flexibiliteit, release cycli en de 'two-speed system' benadering van het combineren van snel bewegende verkooptechnologie met een stabiele ERP-backbone.

Van frictie bij het afrekenen tot verandermanagement, deze aflevering zit vol inzichten voor teams die moeten kiezen tussen best-of-suite, best-of-breed of een hybride opstelling die schaalbaar is.

Luister naar deze podcast op Spotify , Apple podcastsof YouTube.

00:00:00.000 [Music] 00:00:11.440 All right, guys. Thank you for being here. Uh, thank you for letting me interview you. 00:00:18.480 Um, it would be good for those that hadn't heard uh you speak yet or haven't 00:00:23.760 heard you on the podcast yet just to quickly introduce yourself. Um and maybe Chris, let's start with you. 00:00:30.320 Right. Uh my name is Chris. Uh I'm a solution architect at the digital. Uh I 00:00:35.520 started my UDO journey as a uh freelancer and then started a UDO agency 00:00:41.200 in Antworp called Digv. But recently I joined Digital as a solution architect 00:00:47.120 and uh very happy to be here. Nice. And my name is Sam. I'm one of the co-founders of Dear Digital. I mostly 00:00:53.840 focus on the Shopify part of things. Um, and it's impossible that you don't know Chris yet because we had a wonderful 00:00:59.440 podcast not so long ago. Awesome. Um, I think it would be interesting for the audience to also 00:01:05.360 hear how you got in touch with Shopify and let's just take Sam as the Shopify 00:01:11.280 guru and let's take Chris as the odor guru today. How did you get in touch with uh well each software right well 00:01:20.159 let me start. So um as I said earlier, I was a freelance web developer and I was 00:01:26.000 basically working on all types of web development projects like some Wix 00:01:31.040 websites or some um websites on maybe um 00:01:36.960 what is it called again? Well, WooCommerce and other uh typical websites and once a good friend of mine 00:01:44.560 invited me to collaborate on a ODO project that was also e-commerce related. And I really fell in love with 00:01:52.000 the way that the uh software was set up. Uh it was actually my first ODO project 00:01:58.560 and uh the developer experience was so good that I was actually interested in finding more work in that space and 00:02:05.040 eventually with that same friend uh we started DigF as our first ODO venture. Great. 00:02:10.720 Awesome. Um we actually had a e-commerce company before. So John and I um and we 00:02:17.840 basically build it out on Shopify and we really liked it. Uh we then moved to Magento um and after selling the company 00:02:25.599 because we got acquired and blah blah and that's why we went to Magento because we had to. But then when we sold 00:02:31.040 the company we basically went back to our first love which was Shopify. Shopify has evolved massively um like 00:02:37.599 from that point in time. I think it's 10 years ago. Um, and so yeah, now I'm still working on Shopify in the service 00:02:43.920 business that we now started, which is Dear Digital. Insane. Um, I think it would be 00:02:49.760 interesting to have a bit of a comparison between both softwares. Um, 00:02:55.120 and maybe let's maybe just start on very practical things. Uh, what compares uh 00:03:01.440 with to to each software? Um maybe S you can just lay a bit of the the steam 00:03:07.519 because as I understand it UDU is a huge 00:03:12.640 uh business management software. What's what's shocked by them? 00:03:18.000 Yeah. So I would say that they're not at all the same. I mean ODO has some 00:03:24.560 specific features that are close to what Shopify does. Um but it's also quite 00:03:30.560 interesting to see both softwares evolve over time. Um ODUS obviously has has had 00:03:37.280 a massive um yeah like growth over the last couple of years. Um they also 00:03:42.799 focused for quite some time on e-commerce and everything e-commerce specific. Um and on the Shopify things obviously 00:03:49.760 they evolved massively as well. um and they mostly transitioned from like a mom 00:03:56.159 and pop store kind of setup towards also um a software that can handle a lot of 00:04:02.239 business logic um for automations and and etc. Um but on the other hand even 00:04:08.799 within the involvement of Shopify Shopify is not an ERP system right so you do have your inventory in Shopify 00:04:15.840 but that doesn't mean that um yeah you have complex uh things that you can add from a inventory perspective or a 00:04:22.560 manufacturing perspective. So I would position it mostly like Shopify is very much focused on selling selling on 00:04:29.440 different uh sales channels while ODO in my brain because I work mostly on the 00:04:34.880 Shopify side of things, right? Can power what you sell on that store. Um, and 00:04:40.400 this needs to be created. And so this is completely what ODO then focuses on. And obviously you can run your company like 00:04:48.080 maybe one more thing like I could I I would see Odo as your operating system 00:04:53.440 um for your company. So it can also handle stuff for your employees um holidays and planning etc. 00:05:00.720 While Shopify obviously doesn't focus on that. It's like a specific package of software that allows you to sell online 00:05:07.440 as easily as possible. not only online because obviously they also have retail and stuff so that's also big for them 00:05:13.360 but it's basically mostly focused on selling I would say and not operating your business on top of right uh yeah I totally agree with Sam 00:05:21.520 uh UDO is a full service ERP so it's a all-in-one business software uh it has 00:05:28.560 come a long way uh I know due to the recent hype a lot of people have the feeling that we do is a hip and new 00:05:35.039 technology but it already has over 20 years of development behind it. So a lot 00:05:40.960 of typical business flows already well embedded into the system and e-commerce 00:05:46.320 as uh it is known in odo is just one of the many apps that is uh available to 00:05:52.320 that system. Definitely one of the apps that has seen a large evolution in the 00:05:57.440 last couple of years especially from like V15 to 16 17 and 18 but it's just 00:06:03.680 one of the many other different important uh business flows that odo can handle. How many apps are there in Udoo? 00:06:10.639 Oh, uh close to 100. Uh what I would say like real apps. Uh because odo has a big 00:06:18.639 difference between like full service apps with like an UI and typical uh functionalities that the user would use. 00:06:25.680 But ODO also has a lot of little helper modules, you know, things that um make a 00:06:30.880 connection with a very specific other service. That's a module that's available to ODO. For example, uh the 00:06:37.759 send cloud integration is something that odo has provided to its user free of 00:06:42.960 use, but that's not a app on its own. It's part of the e-commerce and other 00:06:48.000 sales related apps. But when it comes to like uh small modules like over a couple of hundreds, 00:06:53.840 but when it comes to like real usable UI based apps, uh close to 100. I think 00:06:59.039 it's like 80 or 90. Yeah. Insane. Um I think it would be interesting just 00:07:05.840 just to to focus a bit on what you then earlier said more of the e-commerce and 00:07:10.880 just do quick comparison in between both because in my head I would then consider 00:07:15.919 in let's say in voodoo terms Shopify exists out of like maybe four or five modules. They have the online store, you 00:07:22.880 have the POS system, you have the B2B setup, you have uh the flow which is more of an automation logic. So they 00:07:29.520 only had like a few modules and then let's maybe compare um those first and 00:07:35.199 then afterwards we can get into a bit more like okay but why are they 00:07:40.720 different and obviously the how is what we're getting into or what is different 00:07:45.840 uh do they both have a CS a contact management system. Well yeah obviously uh that's an easy 00:07:53.680 one. How's reporting for road systems? On the ODO side, reporting is pretty 00:08:00.800 solid. It wouldn't be the most uh extreme reporting you've ever seen, but uh most typical e-commerce companies 00:08:07.440 would get a general idea of how they're doing. Yeah. So, I mean, analytics for Shopify, 00:08:13.919 um it's kind of a nuance story already. I won't dive into it too much, but just to like um say something about it, 00:08:20.720 Google Analytics is obviously big when you have a website. um they kind of screwed up a bit like a couple of years 00:08:26.000 ago. So Shopify tried to fill in the void to also um have a lot of web analytics within Shopify. So you 00:08:32.640 obviously have everything from a sales perspective which is also included in Shopify into beautiful dashboards but 00:08:38.559 also from a web analytics point of view. So they try to skate towards having a 00:08:44.880 full dashboarding um thing available both from a yeah events on the website 00:08:50.959 perspective but also from a sales perspective. So I try to integrate it very well. Okay. You said um events and like sales 00:08:58.000 because I I want to get into like inventory management something very typical if we see into commerce 00:09:03.920 companies they have physical goods. Um how is how both how do both compare? How 00:09:09.680 would you say it? Yeah. So, ODO definitely has a uh fullervice inventory 00:09:15.360 management app um that they use uh outside of e-commerce. What that's one of the powers of ODO, how the different 00:09:22.640 modules and applications can actually work together. So, the typical inventory flow that odo has in and of itself is 00:09:30.320 directly tied to the e-commerce. So, uh, products being sold online will also, uh, generate the necessary moves. It 00:09:37.279 will probably also generate the necessary, uh, reordering rules if that's set up correctly. So, I would say 00:09:43.200 that it's a pretty decent implementation of, uh, inventory management from an e-commerce perspective. 00:09:48.480 Yeah, maybe just to add to that, um, inventory in terms of like purchase inventory as well, the whole purchasing 00:09:54.800 flow. Yeah, definitely. So uh even purchasing and manufacturing all these different 00:10:00.640 types of flows that can lead to uh new SKUs or new items in your inventory are 00:10:07.279 completely uh comprised in the system already and they are pretty plug-andplay with each other. 00:10:13.279 So from the Shopify perspective um there is quite a lot of uh change that happened over the the last couple of 00:10:19.200 years. Um before again it was quite basic or very basic like obviously 00:10:24.720 inventory is something that Shopify knows because yeah you cannot continue selling when you're out of stock. So 00:10:29.760 like the simple things of how much inventory I have that's included. Um but 00:10:35.519 now they all also build quite a lot of um more or harder workflows. Um because 00:10:42.160 uh if you have an online store, you basically probably want to scale internationally. But by scale internationally, that means that you 00:10:48.640 might have different locations, different warehouses, different things that you want to ship from different places. Um so that became a bit more 00:10:55.680 robust, I would say, from a Shopify perspective that you can do order routing based on 00:11:00.800 specific logic. Um, and then from a purchasing perspective, I would say obviously you can also have purchase 00:11:06.800 orders, but that's not as robust, I think, as you would see in a typical ERP 00:11:12.640 system. And then when it completely breaks, so to say, is when you um get into manufacturing because that's just 00:11:18.560 something that Shopify doesn't uh even touch, right? It's not really necessary 00:11:23.839 from their perspective. You do purchasing because you have to have inflow of goods that you later will sell. Um and the selling of that 00:11:30.800 inventory is obviously also inside of Shopify and then the order routing like I just mentioned. Um but manufacturing 00:11:36.720 is just typical ERP stuff. So there it really ends. I would say yeah you can purchase the ingredients of 00:11:42.000 your cake and then sell the final product. So maybe we turn into that later but 00:11:47.200 there are some stores that have a quite simple flow of manufacturing and then 00:11:52.480 you can organize that but with an external app. So you see that obviously some apps fill in the void of this 00:11:59.040 manufacturing type of process but this is easy manufacturing right also where I 00:12:04.079 would say maybe one more thing about where it stops is in UDO you also have the warehousing part like where are 00:12:09.839 certain things like physically standing right this is also not something that Shopify has it just like do I have 10 00:12:16.959 still where is it positioned in warehouse it doesn't make it doesn't really matter but so you you don't 00:12:22.639 manage your warehouse with it you just sell the orders or the products basically. So things like picking. 00:12:28.160 Yeah, exactly. That's not included yet. Yeah. Okay. Maybe then because I knew there was 00:12:33.440 going to be a very strong point for UDO. Maybe a bit more around everything. There was the front end, the flexibility 00:12:39.760 of the front end, the speed of the front end, the usability front end. Yeah. Um for UDO, it's a bit uh of a 00:12:47.360 story in two parts. I think for the general use cases, right, people that want to uh design a nice and easy 00:12:54.560 website with the website builder, it's a pretty decent experience. Uh especially with the come coming of uh V17. Um they 00:13:02.880 have some AI functionality to really um start off with an idea and give some 00:13:09.600 details to your design that would have taken some manual labor. That's totally automated. But once you once you want to 00:13:16.880 go to the territory of like very custom designs, then maybe the platform is uh 00:13:21.920 somewhat restrictive. Uh you don't always have the um easiest experience to 00:13:27.680 change uh how the website will look, right? Um it's kind of opinionated. Um 00:13:32.959 the structure of the website is pretty set in stone. Uh it works with the Q web engine which is like very structured and 00:13:39.519 doesn't really allow you to uh free ball it too much. So u that might be a uh 00:13:46.320 that's a point I do want to understand really well because that's something I I tell our our customers quite often as 00:13:51.680 well. you can build whatever you want in Odo. 00:13:57.040 Um, see the problem is ODO already uh has a lot of functionalities embedded 00:14:02.639 into the system, right? So, um, if you want to reuse that uh functionality, 00:14:08.959 it's best for you to stay within the confounds of uh what ODO already has. 00:14:14.160 Uh, has to do with time and budget though. Yeah, it's a time and budget thing, but it's also the general idea of how the 00:14:21.120 technology is set up, right? Um it's right now uh pretty uh static with the Q 00:14:26.560 web engine, right? So you have templates that uh are loaded on the time you load the page, but uh how would the uh UI 00:14:34.320 evolve with certain clicks and certain events? That's uh much less flexible than other platforms. Uh that might 00:14:41.199 change soon because ODO has spent quite some time um having a uh completely new 00:14:47.279 uh UI framework uh developed. uh it's called the owl framework and uh it's very flexible, very powerful and I'm 00:14:53.279 very interested in seeing how they will start incorporating that into e-commerce but uh without it it's a little bit too 00:14:59.839 static to really have those beautiful fluid modern designs that we see nowadays. 00:15:06.160 Nice Sam for you and we we haven't touched on base speed and loading in these things 00:15:12.399 but of course um from what I understand from ODO's site I 00:15:20.240 think it would be kind of similar for Shopify to be really honest um obviously 00:15:25.440 we call it the online store the theme that you have natively in in Shopify 00:15:30.639 they spend a lot of time and money on it because they want to make it as easy as possible But with making it as easy as 00:15:38.000 possible, there obviously come a lot of um trade-offs. Um but if you're really 00:15:44.240 and I think they worked a lot to make it more flexible for people who really understand it well and who wants to 00:15:49.759 build who want to build whatever they want to build. Um so I think they're striking the balance very well in terms of making 00:15:56.639 sure it's supported and that it's fast out of the box, but that it's um flexible enough to do whatever you want 00:16:03.279 to do. Um but obviously there like always um yeah the quality of the people 00:16:09.199 or the insight and the experience of the people that build on top of the platform is very important because you have to 00:16:14.880 understand how you should build the theme in Shopify to make sure it stays as performant as Shopify um gives you 00:16:22.399 the themes out of the box. Um I once uh did a course about um like um yeah core 00:16:29.600 web vitals and stuff and one of the people that initially worked at Google to um really um like put those 00:16:36.480 frameworks in in in in the world he started working at Shopify. So, just to like let you understand that they invest 00:16:42.320 massively in trying to understand how a page is loaded and maybe a lot of people that are listening to the podcast, they 00:16:48.959 don't really necessarily understand like how deep that goes, but it goes quite deep. And I think Shopify has invested 00:16:55.519 massively in in in that. And then you obviously also have the same um uh as as 00:17:01.040 the do um frameworks is like they have the owl framework but Shopify also invested in their own um more like 00:17:08.079 headless type of framework which is indeed a JavaScript based framework um that is called hydrogen. um they didn't 00:17:15.839 do it from the start or make it from the start which I do which I understand that ODU did which is like super interesting 00:17:22.480 but they uh basically bought a framework um that was open source and then they built hydrogen on top of it to make it 00:17:29.520 commerce opinionated um so basically what I'm saying if you just summarize everything they have a lot the out of 00:17:35.600 the box themes that are really performance and that you can build on top of and have a lot of flexibility in but if you really need all the 00:17:42.559 flexibility in the world then they also have this framework uh which is kind of similar to how it's built in uh which is 00:17:48.799 called hydrogen in the in the Shopify ecosystem. Yeah, we haven't I it seems like a good time to touch upon it like 00:17:55.120 the the hydrogen the headless the these things have been mentioned now 00:18:00.559 maybe Chris you have an interesting experience there yeah so um I had the opportunity to uh 00:18:07.520 develop a fully headless website on odo um just for um the viewers information 00:18:15.039 uh what does a headless website entail it basically means that you have a 00:18:20.160 completely uh separate front end experience, user experience uh outside of ODO while still maintaining the core 00:18:27.600 functionality of ODO. So, usually it's a uh JavaScript web app or website that 00:18:33.039 runs on a completely se separate server but communicates with the ODO server to 00:18:38.240 actually get all the important information like uh customer details, uh product details and actually pushing the 00:18:45.360 order through. Um we ended up doing that uh a year ago and it was a pretty nice 00:18:51.120 experience and the biggest motivators for us to uh go in that uh direction was 00:18:58.000 uh first of all the flexibility of having a uh completely open uh front-end 00:19:03.600 framework right we did it in the era of 2023 to 2024 00:19:10.240 so um the AL framework was uh new but not completely 00:19:16.160 uh in the known uh in the know yet. So uh we used Vue.js which is like a very 00:19:22.559 well-known uh JavaScript framework to basically uh develop a completely new um 00:19:27.760 front end experience. And with that flexibility, we also could really have a design that was fully tailor made to 00:19:35.120 that customer uh without really taking into consider consideration the typical 00:19:40.559 structure of an ODO website because ODO is very structured. So the way a header 00:19:45.600 and the main body and the footer is set up, it's pretty particular. But in that instance, we had all the freedom in the 00:19:51.840 world. Um it also allowed us to reach some um very important uh website 00:19:58.400 performance metrics uh when it comes to like just uh page speed and other web core vitals. And those two things were 00:20:05.760 the most important ones. Okay. So if I were to summarize it with headless, you can have just more 00:20:11.840 freedom. You're not stuck. I stuck is the wrong wording, but you're not limited to the video environment. Uh 00:20:18.720 probably the same for for Shopify. You have more freedom there. Yes. Yeah. As I know, it also comes with 00:20:25.600 an extra costs not only in terms of budget but also in terms of like maintenance and 00:20:30.640 yeah, extra complexity in terms of like software of course. uh which is a very important 00:20:36.000 thing for ODO because um ODO as a ERP is very interesting because uh unlike a lot 00:20:42.400 of other uh ERPs uh ODO is actually constantly evolving right a new version 00:20:48.000 every year that's not very typical for most ERPs if you look at like an SAP or 00:20:53.520 um Microsoft Dynamics or whatever other ERP you know uh these are usually 00:20:58.799 versions that are uh stuck in the time and it takes like a really long time 00:21:04.000 before they upgrade. In ODO, that's not the case. It's very typical for like a uh very conscious ODO uh customer to 00:21:12.159 like migrate every two years. And that does put a lot of strain on like the 00:21:18.080 whole stack of a customer base. But the cool thing with headless is um that's 00:21:23.840 something that's basically taken out of the equation, right? So you could basically continue evolving the front 00:21:30.400 end even though the back end is maybe going through a migration or other 00:21:35.520 structural changes as long as the API that you communicate with stays the same. Uh a headless website actually 00:21:41.360 gives you the opportunity to uh evolve on two separate tracks. Yeah, interesting. Maybe that's 00:21:48.159 something that I didn't write down but innovation is an interesting one. you mentioned once a year is upgrading um 00:21:56.000 the whole stack indeed. How is it for for files? Um so it's two times a year. Um there is 00:22:04.240 a summer and a winter edition. And so what Shopify tries to do is um 00:22:11.120 um is is they try to always migrate or push out new stuff um because you have a 00:22:17.280 a SAS subscription and you basically pay Shopify to innovate. Um, and so the 00:22:22.720 system is very much built around the ability for Shopify to in the back end 00:22:27.919 actually continuously update and not breaking the experience that the merchant or the customer has. So they do 00:22:34.480 have two very um specific moments where they announce a lot of updates but there 00:22:40.720 are throughout the year constant updates happening as well. Um yeah, new 00:22:45.840 features, new APIs, etc. that are coming out basically also not on those distinct 00:22:52.000 times but in between. Um and that's actually really important and interesting from an architectural point 00:22:57.840 of view because yeah, you need to build stuff uh in a way um again that that if 00:23:05.120 Shopify pushes updates from their site, things don't break um for for us. So it's it's kind of an interesting mindset 00:23:11.760 from a development perspective and we call it within the Shopify ecosystem extensibilities. Um, so you basically 00:23:18.400 you have I I always say this like a little door that Shopify gives you basically and so they provide doors into 00:23:24.960 their system but they tell you how you should use that door so that when they 00:23:30.080 create in the back room that they have access to if they change stuff around they know that if you build it in the 00:23:35.919 right way through this door or how you should use the door that the things that you build on top of it will migrate 00:23:41.280 together with uh the Shopify uh updates which is kind of interesting because again you pay um to Shopify and it's 00:23:47.919 really nice that because the commerce world changes like crazy now we have everything AI related maybe we're going 00:23:53.840 to discuss it maybe not um but yeah constant change is potentially necessary 00:23:58.960 and by doing this um Shopify allows them to continuously innovate um while 00:24:04.640 keeping the changes or the customizations intact uh for the for the user and the merchant. 00:24:10.720 Yeah, totally. I think we're slowly getting in into the area that I I'm I'm 00:24:15.840 also excited to talk about is we've talked about a bit of the features and I 00:24:20.880 think we can have a whole day around just comparing features. I think a whole day around things that Shopify doesn't 00:24:27.440 have and Udu does have but I think in the core it's just a difference in 00:24:33.360 philosophy of software. Uh maybe Chris you can talk a bit around what the philosophy is actually of Dan Fabia and 00:24:39.840 why he started the company and how UDU is today. Yeah, I think um one of the most 00:24:46.799 important uh takeaways for UDO is the fact that it's really supposed to be a 00:24:52.640 all-in-one uh business solution. So um it's definitely trying to be good at 00:24:58.400 every single use case that it can serve but it has to be realistic in its uh 00:25:04.720 pursuits right so even every version that you have um has a very specific 00:25:10.000 road map in mind so it's very possible that certain modules over a span of a year don't really change that much 00:25:17.039 that's a reality but the other modules that were on the road map will definitely have some uh groundbreaking 00:25:23.279 changes So, um it's hard to uh predict where the future is for every single uh 00:25:30.000 app on the ecosystem uh because you only really know it for up to a year in advance when the UDO 19 uh version will 00:25:38.400 come out in September. Somewhere along of the October, November, we already 00:25:43.600 would get a road map for ODU 20 and it's really trying to be a generalist software. It's uh very uh 00:25:51.919 obvious once you start using it, right? Uh ODO is very flexible, extensible and 00:25:58.240 open. It's not trying to be the best at everything. It's trying to be a very good base case and really allowing the 00:26:06.400 uh UDO ecosystem to give the customers the necessary flexibility to, you know, 00:26:11.679 fill in the gaps together with their partners if necessary to really get to that uh sweet spot where they basically 00:26:18.159 have the system that they need. So all of all of the apps working together is like if the the use case for 00:26:25.679 red do Yeah, indeed. So um by design everything is really um connected with each other. 00:26:33.039 Um there's basically no such thing as a completely isolated app. There are no 00:26:40.000 silos like uh automatically once you make a sale order there's automatically 00:26:46.159 like a delivery created uh and if the delivery is uh happening there's also 00:26:53.120 some stock moves going on. So everything is really well integrated and uh the philosophy is really all about getting 00:27:00.559 every app working together in harmony and getting uh the base case right. Yeah. If I were to if you were to pit it 00:27:08.240 against um Shopify, how's how's Shopify in that regard? 00:27:14.159 Um yeah, I think also just evolving very quickly, but very focused on commerce, 00:27:20.400 right? Um so it's it's actually a hard philosophical 00:27:27.039 question. I I don't always know what to say about it other than 00:27:32.400 in Shopify you have a lot of people in the ecosystem that are only focused as at making this commerce solution better. 00:27:39.520 Um and yeah that that comes with a lot of 00:27:45.200 upgrades and a lot of new things that they that they make. Um especially in a 00:27:50.480 time where everything changes like we are more or less currently in. Um that's interesting. But um on another like in 00:27:58.080 another way of thinking you could also say like I think there were from what I have seen and I've seen a lot of odo setups as well. Um there are a lot of 00:28:05.039 building blocks in Odo on on top of which you can build a lot of things. So 00:28:10.320 you could actually also argue which is just interesting from a dear digital perspective because we do both that if 00:28:15.760 you have a commerce way of thinking because we know commerce so well from a Shopify side of things we can actually 00:28:21.840 also build a lot into ODO because we kind of know how to look at commerce and what to do with those building blocks 00:28:27.840 that odo has. Um but as you have and I think we will move into that as well. 00:28:32.880 Best of breed and best of sweet software there is obviously still a bit of a 00:28:38.240 difference between certain things that are done in a best of breed versus a best of suite because you just have so 00:28:44.960 many people focused on one specific thing that they want to solve which is commerce. Um and up until this point in 00:28:51.440 time, next to retail and B2B commerce online, Shopify also has this single um 00:28:57.679 focus uh still. Um yeah. Yeah. Would you agree? No, I totally agree. I think uh it would 00:29:04.480 be crazy to assume that ODO has the same focus on commerce as Shopify has. Uh 00:29:11.120 that's just not the case. Uh I do think that ODU is an ambitious company and they're doing great things every single 00:29:17.039 year, but the scope is just way broader. Um they are concerned with over 80 00:29:23.679 business apps. Not all of them get as much attention, but you get the idea. Um 00:29:29.360 they're constantly trying to gauge the market on the total uh business 00:29:34.799 landscape and fill in the gaps for uh a new segment of the market for uh ERP 00:29:40.559 software. And sometimes that might be e-commerce but the other time that might be rental and the other time might be 00:29:45.840 completely something else. If you were to represent like visually would it be okay if I said uh mostly is 00:29:52.799 batting on the horizontal sides of things and Shopify has chose like a few 00:29:58.320 horizontals and is going vertically way deeper. Um or would you say well like 00:30:05.039 you said before each road map in chooses like hey here we should go deeper into that module we should go deeper into 00:30:11.520 those business needs then yeah I think u that might change but 00:30:17.039 today that's definitely the case so um they are focused uh thank god I don't think it would be uh a successful idea 00:30:24.559 to just try to do everything at the same time so what I really like about odo is 00:30:29.600 they're very realistic about what they can achieve in a year and they have a very good focus on those specific uh 00:30:36.720 tasks they set up for themselves. But it's always a uh very specific subset. 00:30:42.000 It's like maybe 15% of the total uh scope that they really uh zoom in on and 00:30:49.120 try to improve and that's just the reality of it. Yeah. And so from my perspective I I 00:30:54.799 just also want to add like and this is we're both solution architects. Um what we actually want to do and what we do 00:31:00.880 and Shopify also separate separately want to do is try to have the best possible solution for a specific 00:31:07.440 customer and it's very important to understand what this customer is because a lot of 00:31:12.799 customers they only see themsel um which makes a ton of sense because they need to focus on their business right um but 00:31:19.440 they don't necessarily always understand how different different customers might be um and now we're which I love but we're 00:31:26.399 saying Shopify versus ODO or like which are the differences? But you can also 00:31:31.520 argue like yeah there are just several companies and we because we understand those businesses quite well or sorry the 00:31:38.640 platforms quite well. We have to try and understand the business very well to just then see how that maps on only odo 00:31:46.720 Shopify and do only Shopify and even and that's even more important that in these 00:31:51.919 kinds of discussions you don't really necessarily also understand is how that might evolve over time because they 00:31:57.600 might go for Shopify specifically because they want for example grow very rapidly online but then see because they 00:32:04.240 were so successful that they need ERP they need they have more employees they want to manage those employees they want 00:32:10.240 to manage their planning they want to manage their vacation their holidays etc and then you need an operating system 00:32:15.360 for your business not only to have commerce and so then you start to move in the interesting direction which is 00:32:21.360 what I think we are very both very much excited about um yeah is that you try to 00:32:26.480 just come up with a solution based on do and Shopify and potentially something else right but I think we cover quite a 00:32:32.240 lot with those two um platforms to see where we should go next um and this 00:32:39.279 Yeah, that's where the super interesting stuff also happens. Um, so it's really dependent basically 00:32:44.480 on on what you need um and what is important for your growth. I think we've seen a lot of our 00:32:51.120 customers do both. Uh we're obviously fan of having both. Um 00:32:58.000 why you said because of a certain business reason of understanding certain business. Why would a customer go for 00:33:04.799 Shopify as sales channels and why would they have UDU more as a DRB system? 00:33:12.960 Honestly, um I think if you haven't been living under a rock, uh it's 00:33:19.360 non-negotiable. uh it's a reality that Shopify has really been uh a dominant 00:33:25.360 player in the uh e-commerce sphere and uh a lot of these customers know that 00:33:30.399 and uh it's not abnormal for a customer to already have made the decision in their mind that they want to sell on uh 00:33:37.279 Shopify and even if they don't have that preconceived notion uh it's still the 00:33:42.559 number one storefront and the number one checkout in the world right now. Uh I think something that uh as a uh mainly 00:33:49.679 ODO solution architect that I think is so amazing about Shopify is how easy and 00:33:55.760 fussf free the checkout process is. Uh as someone we even made a uh headless experience uh odo is super powerful, 00:34:02.799 super great but just by design of how um some of these data structures are set up 00:34:08.480 the checkout itself is a little bit more awkward right um you have to create the 00:34:14.079 customer in the back end as a partner object you have to do some data validation so naturally the checkout in 00:34:22.239 ODO is always in a multi-step process and for a lot of people that seems like 00:34:27.440 a very um minor detail and not important. But uh as you get to the 00:34:33.918 higher level of selling, you really understand that um the art of removing friction in the checkout is really 00:34:41.599 something that we can't um underestimate. And Shopify really has 00:34:47.119 done it in a very elegant way where uh the money is magically like disappearing out of your pocket. It's like very 00:34:54.639 sleek, very uh easy and that is something that ODO hasn't reached yet. I 00:35:01.680 think it has necessary tools to do so and I'm pretty sure it will get there in uh the nearby future. But that kind of 00:35:10.560 um selling firepower is kind of missing in odo right now. And I understand that 00:35:16.240 trying to have it into your uh total um yeah customer experience is very 00:35:22.640 valuable to the point where you would actually separate the e-commerce and maybe more than e-commerce, right? some 00:35:28.880 of the retail um operations to Shopify but still rely on the very robust and 00:35:35.200 powerful features of ODU when it comes to accounting, manufacturing, inventory, 00:35:40.320 etc., etc. Yeah, exactly. Fully agree. For each uh for Shopify, Verdue, are 00:35:48.960 there examples where you would say Shopify only works really well or udu only works really well? Also maybe I can 00:35:55.680 go first for um yeah we we we so we started our company five years ago 00:36:00.880 whatever we had a lot of startups and scaleups. It also depends a bit on the kind of product that you sell but there 00:36:07.359 are a lot of um so it's kind of hard to put them into buckets because it depends a bit on how you sell and what you sell. 00:36:14.240 But there are a lot of companies who grew to 10 million in sales only being on Shopify. And again, it points a bit 00:36:20.800 towards what we discussed before is if you don't have manufacturing kind of or you don't have your own warehouses or 00:36:26.800 you don't have a lot of people that you need to manage basically, right? Because then you need your operating system for 00:36:31.839 your company and that typically goes towards um then you can actually sell um a lot on on Shopify. So those are the 00:36:38.000 typical s um companies that only are on Shopify, but it's kind of a weird setup 00:36:44.160 because how you still need to operate your business somehow, right? Excel. Yeah. 00:36:49.520 Yeah, exactly. That's what I was going to say. Or there is a lot of um I mean invoicing and stuff uh bookkeeping it's 00:36:55.280 it's very important and then you have other tools but it makes a lot of sense to then also go to do from the moment. 00:37:01.440 Um yeah that you need this type of stuff and that's where odo is also so smart 00:37:06.560 because it's kind is it still free when you use like one app? Yeah. So I mean you you can grow into it and when you 00:37:12.960 need a certain thing you can go to Udoo and then um make it broader what you're doing on Udoo. Um so I would say yes 00:37:20.240 there are a lot of brands that we saw that are only on Shopify but they then manage stuff um in a weird and awkward 00:37:27.680 way in Google Sheets like you say where they actually would have also benefited from using ODO. So I would say with the 00:37:34.960 very small threshold that odo has there shouldn't be too many companies to be really honest that only use Shopify 00:37:41.359 because from the moment you have a company you better just start playing around with the very low threshold stuff 00:37:46.640 that do has to offer you which is very powerful. Yeah. Yeah definitely. Well for me the 00:37:52.240 answer would be a little bit more nuanced. I think I have like three buckets in my mind that totally make 00:37:58.160 sense. Uh the first bucket is a pretty similar uh one as Sam said. Uh I think 00:38:03.760 Shopify for like very early startups can be very cheap but uh I don't think it's 00:38:08.960 as cheap as free. So um you can actually uh get started on Odo for completely 00:38:14.640 nothing which uh seems like a great idea for people that are really just trying 00:38:20.079 to get their feet wet uh see uh where they can get with the system and it's already the type of system that can well 00:38:28.000 uh easily handle uh large enterprises. So already being there from the start is 00:38:33.920 not even a bad decision because you can really grow into uh that next level. Uh 00:38:39.440 otherwise what I kind of see happen a lot in uh ODO implementations is like 00:38:45.200 companies that already have a very uh specific sales flow that didn't really 00:38:50.720 have any online sales channel and they just tack it on because it's free at 00:38:56.400 that point, right? The licenses of Odo give you access to all the apps for the 00:39:01.920 same price. So oftent times they already have some B2B sales that they do online 00:39:07.040 via email and then they're like, well, we could really use a web portal. Well, it's totally free in your license 00:39:13.440 anyway. And then they get the ball rolling in uh that uh instance. And sometimes we do see that uh business 00:39:20.960 already at a pretty high level uh where you would think that a Shopify would make a lot of sense but their business 00:39:27.040 flow is so peculiar that the total set of um functionalities available in odo 00:39:34.079 uh makes it a no-brainer. I'm thinking about the uh native support for subscriptions uh straight out of 00:39:39.680 e-commerce. So the first two buckets totally made sense. But a third bucket uh which would seem where Shopify is 00:39:46.240 also a very good um fit is companies that are very e-commerce heavy but maybe 00:39:52.320 because of their very specific functionality needs uh the total package of ODO uh makes too much sense to ignore 00:39:59.599 it. Uh I'm thinking about companies that maybe have some uh subscription flows that they need to uh allow to be started 00:40:07.200 from uh the front end the e-commerce. Uh odo has native support for that quite easily. Um the handling of CRM leads 00:40:15.680 from the website back to a uh different sales team that might really uh go into 00:40:22.800 it. So the different types of uh customers that have really specific 00:40:27.920 needs, they might be surprised by how much things odo already uh does natively 00:40:34.240 in the completely same license as whatever other uh business would 00:40:39.680 actually pay for. Yeah, we've touched it a bit uh and and 00:40:46.000 obviously we've talked quite a bit about it as well before. Uh but there's this 00:40:51.359 concept within like the software architecture called twospeed systems. Uhhuh. 00:40:56.480 uh one system just going at rapid innovation, moving fast, um just making sure that 00:41:03.599 growth is as fast as possible and then you have the the first speed which is slower, more stable. Um yeah, what's 00:41:11.920 what's your take on it? because we've looked at like more monolithic stack just the best of sweet the philosophy of 00:41:18.160 like let's say mostly u then you have the best of breed and they tend way more 00:41:23.520 towards like the the microservices just together with like a shitload of 00:41:29.680 APIs needing to be connected to together because you have like 15 softwares that need to seamlessly talk to each other 00:41:35.839 but you might need five other engineers just to support all of those systems. True. Um, and there's there's supposedly 00:41:42.720 this in between version two speed systems. Yes. Uh, yeah, maybe I can just say 00:41:49.040 something about it. Um, I think it makes a lot of sense from what I have seen because there are a lot 00:41:54.640 of ERP related things that just pretty much probably will remain quite static. 00:42:00.720 Obviously, you need to do changes and upgrades, etc. But like having inventory and your warehouse um, and stuff, I mean, you 00:42:08.000 want that to be very stable. bookkeeping etc. Um, once somebody told me because 00:42:13.200 this is something obviously that also grows in our minds as we progress through our own business and and seeing different kinds of customers that 00:42:20.319 sometimes because a lot of things that we actually do with customers is change management and change management is really hard. Um, and some people just 00:42:27.200 said like why do you want even a system? Why do you want a system that that that grows so fast or like innovates so fast? 00:42:32.880 Because then you need to constantly do a lot of change management. So even from a psychological perspective in companies, 00:42:39.119 you would want to have a two-speed system because a lot of people just use the operating system of your company and 00:42:45.440 that doesn't need to necessarily change too much because you will basically create too too much chaos in in the 00:42:51.040 company. But when you then separate out um and I think it's mostly like marketing and sales kinds of um flows I 00:42:58.480 I would think you just need to be on top of your game because you have a lot of 00:43:03.760 competition out there and you basically need to make sure you sell and you capture the market and you better be 00:43:10.079 very fast in this very fastm moving technologybased world where all of a 00:43:16.240 sudden AI comes along and you have to start selling in um chat bots or or 00:43:21.520 whatever. Um or marketplaces all of a sudden become huge. Um so you have to be able to be flexible to jump on those 00:43:28.560 things. Um separately you are maybe growing as a company very hard and 00:43:33.760 having to have different kinds of customer segments and thus also specific experiences per kind of customer 00:43:40.079 segment. You better make sure that the people who run this storefront or this 00:43:45.200 commerce uh thing that you have be able to test stuff out and that they can rely 00:43:51.119 on huge ecosystems of apps um that have solved certain things already for you 00:43:56.960 instead of you having to reinvent the wheel basically. Yeah. So I think that it makes a lot of 00:44:02.079 sense from a OS operating system perspective and then bolting on top of it marketing and sales that you indeed 00:44:09.280 have kind of two separate um speeds. And maybe one more thing that I once saw 00:44:14.880 with a customer that I found very um smart. Maybe you already know it, but it's a bit of a weird word or or way of 00:44:21.760 thinking, but you want to set yourself up that if you have separate systems um 00:44:27.920 that you keep the separate systems dumb so to say, so that you're not too much 00:44:33.839 um like dependent on the other system. So for example, if you have then Shopify 00:44:39.440 and Udu, um you want to make sure that if you need to have an integration, which we're now saying in my example that you need, um you don't want if you 00:44:46.640 want to change thing in things in Shopify that you're also always dependent of the system that you're integrated with, which is you do. So you 00:44:52.800 need to set it up in an architectural way so that you have the freedom to change whatever you want to change 00:44:57.839 within Shopify. Um because otherwise you're actually dependent on the speed 00:45:02.960 system that is a bit slower, which you don't want to get. You want to have this separation and have the flexibility to 00:45:08.319 do what you want in the system that allows you to move maybe way faster than the operating system does. This is not 00:45:14.720 to say that obviously ODO doesn't or like you say before because then you might understand why SAP and Microsoft 00:45:20.480 Dynamics went slowly because they didn't have those challenges from a sales and marketing perspective. So this is obviously also not the correct way of 00:45:27.280 thinking like um about it because obviously odo also needs to um like 00:45:32.640 change and get better but it's in a different way than the other types of systems typically are pressured to move. 00:45:39.680 Um no I totally agree with Sam's take here. Um I also feel like the twospeed systems 00:45:48.240 uh approach also really became quite natural in like the technology world 00:45:53.520 like the sudden boom of headless architectures etc etc. people are 00:45:59.040 realizing that um some parts of a system just need to evolve way faster than 00:46:05.119 other parts. And it totally makes sense, right? Like if it's a ERP system where 00:46:10.319 like 50 employees every day have to log their time sheets and whatever. If that's the system that's constantly 00:46:16.880 being developed, which will inevitably come with downtime and regressions and 00:46:22.400 stuff like that, that doesn't make sense for a U business to run in that way. But 00:46:29.760 other systems that are well let's say not only customerf facing but just much more uh flexible in nature uh it's 00:46:38.079 really nice to really take those opportunities as Sam said the aspect of competition is something that a lot of 00:46:45.200 business owners are not really thinking about because uh it's very real and it's 00:46:51.119 hard to quantify sometimes but being able to keep up with like the newest 00:46:56.720 trends is not something that's just there for bragging rights. It act it's actually there um for like real purposes 00:47:04.480 like it can really affect the gross margin, the revenues that you can achieve. And by allowing you to have 00:47:11.680 that flexibility where you have one system that really does everything you need it to do day by day on a very 00:47:19.440 consistent and uh surefire way, but also having a outlet to really have the most 00:47:27.520 change and the most experimental evolutions. I think that's a very great setup to strive for. 00:47:34.480 Not to mention the talent, right? Because if you have certain people that you want to attract, they also want to 00:47:40.400 work with certain systems. Of course, obviously you can push them a bit in a certain direction. But if you want 00:47:45.920 access to the best talent and one of the things is that they just work with those type of systems. You better make sure 00:47:51.680 that you maybe also are working on those systems because otherwise you need to first start with migrating to a 00:47:57.680 different way of thinking. So it's also interesting from a talent perspective I would say. 00:48:03.359 Awesome guys. I think we've touched quite a bit of uh quite a few subjects. Um and I think we've wrapped up a bit at 00:48:12.000 least but but I think we could talk for days on end around the differences but 00:48:17.280 uh also how they could collaborate together, how it would be a good fit. Definitely. So I'm actually excited to do more of 00:48:24.160 that. Um but for this podcast I would say let's wrap it up. Thank you very much. 00:48:29.760 Thanks for having us. Thanks.

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