Looking for advice on which functions to manage in each of ERPNext and ECommerce applications.
We are a producer and retailer of farm produce and currently use Prestashop for online sales.
We are beginning to use ERPNext for our small business.
Currently Prestashop manages customers, products, prices, stocks by warehouse, sales, order management and basic customer communication.
We intend to use ERPNext for financial accounting, HR, expenses management at a minimum. Given farm production is very unpredictable, we don’t believe manufacturing would be easy to manage in any ERP. The thread on agricultural customization of ERPNext doesn’t seem to have progressed much.
Now the Questions:
Does it make sense to leave the items, customers, orders and sales invoices within Prestashop Ecommerce? Since almost all our sales are on cash basis, if we merely make periodic summary sales journal entries in ERPNext, would that be a good idea? This makes integration of the information very easy to manage, since there is no need to sync items, parties, stocks between the systems.
Are there any benefits to moving customers, itemwise sales into ERPNext? Is ERPNext’s CRM a consideration in this situation? What else will we lose out on by not moving this info?
We plan to use ERPNext for purchases, management of stocks of raw materials and inventory valuation. We do not intend to use it for stocks of WIP or finished goods or their valuation, given the production and stocks of farm produce are hard to manage systematically. Is there a way to reduce stocks of raw materials when they get used up, without linking them to a BOM?
@Chandra you can also move to ERPNext’s internal shopping cart module. It may miss some features, but you have have them built, in the long run, it will be much lesser cost than maintaining a separate integration.
@rmehta Thanks Rushabh. I believe that would be the ideal end state. I have looked at the shopping cart video and it seems a good start. That said, the following will be essential features for the cart; so we will have to start slow before we get there.
COD
Payment gateways (in addition to Razorpay)
Discount coupon codes
Customer Returns
Shipping fees based on postal code
Locationwise shipping carriers
Reward points
Customer referrals
Product categorization, ordering, featured products
Google shopping plugin
On a separate note, I believe you have a very elegant and promising product in ERPNext that we would like to leverage and contribute to. Thanks.
@Chandra thanks for the offer! if you want to migrate to the erpnext webshop we can help you build this. But we will need some funding for this. PM me if you are interested.
Do you mean you have another external website or are you talking about the functionality of ERPNext website and ecommerce part?
ERPNext has quite basic ecommerce functions and we have just established a group to discuss and develop it further. You are also welcome and I suggest you to read first ERPNext manual regarding Website and shopping cart functions.