The challenge
A niche retailer selling luxury perfume samples — small decants of 3ml, 5ml, and 10ml from premium fragrance brands — was selling through Instagram DMs and manual bank transfers. Order tracking was done in a WhatsApp notebook. Stock was managed by memory.
The owner wanted to move to a proper ecommerce setup but had a specific constraint: the business needed to scale quickly, and a separate website + backend system would be too complex to manage solo. The solution had to keep everything — storefront, orders, inventory, and invoicing — in one place.
Why Odoo Website
Most ecommerce businesses use a separate storefront (Shopify, WooCommerce) connected to an ERP through integrations. For this business, the simpler path was Odoo Website, which builds the storefront directly inside Odoo — there is no separate integration to maintain, and product, inventory, and order data is always in sync.
What we built
Odoo Website storefront
- Product catalogue structured around fragrance families (floral, woody, oriental, fresh) with filtering by brand and size
- Sample decant listing format: product photos, brand name, concentration (EDP/EDT/EDP Parfum), available sizes with individual pricing
- Customer accounts for order history and reorder
- Mobile-optimised layout — the majority of buyers discovered products on Instagram before purchasing on mobile
Sales & checkout
- Multi-currency payment support (INR; USD for international orders)
- Coupon codes for influencer partnerships
- Automated order confirmation and shipping update emails
Inventory management
- Each decant size tracked as a separate product variant (e.g., Fragrance X · 3ml, Fragrance X · 5ml)
- Stock deducted automatically on order confirmation
- Low-stock alerts triggered when any variant drops below 5 units
- Restocking purchase orders raised directly in Odoo when full bottles are purchased for decanting
Invoicing
- GST-compliant invoices generated automatically for every order
- B2C invoices emailed immediately on dispatch
Delivery
The project was delivered in 6 weeks — faster than a typical ecommerce implementation because the Odoo Website builder, with minimal customisation, produced a functional storefront. The bulk of the time was spent on product data entry (photographing and describing 80+ fragrances across 3 sizes each), configuration, and payment gateway integration.
Results
- Revenue from the first week — the storefront went live on a Friday; the first 14 orders arrived over the weekend
- Zero manual order processing — the previous Instagram DM + bank transfer workflow was completely replaced; the owner now checks the Odoo order list once in the morning
- Stock accuracy — the owner had been running out of popular sizes unexpectedly; low-stock alerts meant reorder bottles were ordered 2 weeks before running out instead of after
- Customer retention — customer accounts and reorder functionality contributed to a 40% repeat purchase rate within the first 3 months