Dropshipment is the term used when a company sells products that are kept in stock by the supplier(s).
The end customer places an order, which the store forwards to the supplier. The supplier takes care of transport to the end customer. The advantage of dropshipping is that you do not have to keep any stock yourself. It saves you space, risk and, of course, costs.
Dropshipping with Odoo
Odoo gives you the ability to dropship worry-free. In the Purchase module, it is indicated at product level whether dropshipment is possible. After activating it, you can get started right away.
Now, when a sales order is confirmed, no delivery is created, as we would normally expect. After all, we do not handle the delivery ourselves. On the purchasing side, a purchase order is prepared for the supplier with the customer's address as the delivery address. It could hardly be easier. The customer orders from us and our supplier takes care of the shipment.
Below you can see what such a purchase order to the supplier basically looks like. The delivery address on the document is the address of the end customer.
To make sure we do not lose sight of whether the deliveries have actually been made, the dropshipments are tracked separately in the Inventory module. When the supplier confirms that the delivery has been made, we mark the delivery as ready in Odoo so that we can complete the order.
This way, we can easily process a customer order and forward it to our supplier.
