Introduction to Product Creation
What's up, Odoo-ers, and welcome back. Today, I'm going to show you how to create products in the Odoo Sales application. With Odoo, you can configure goods or services, apply attributes and variants, add optional, accessory, and alternative products, and so much more. So let's jump into our database to see how easy it is to set up products in the Odoo Sales application.
Let's start on our Sales app dashboard. From here, we'll go to Products and then Products once again. Then, we'll click New to open a blank product form. Let's say we're creating a new form for our new modern office chair. So, let's start by typing in 'Modern Office Chair'.
Next, we'll add an image of our product so our customers know exactly what they're buying. To do that, we'll click the pencil icon that appears when we hover over this camera square, find our file to upload, and select it. Nice.
Beneath the product title, we have a few checkboxes.
Configuring Service Products
By default, the 'Can be Sold' and 'Can be Purchased' boxes are ticked. The 'Can be Sold' checkbox means that it can be sold, and the 'Can be Purchased' box means that it can be purchased from a vendor. The 'Can be Subscribed' box should only be ticked when creating a subscription product or service. To learn more about that, check out our tutorial about subscription products.
Next, in the General Information tab, to start, we have the Product Type field. This is where we have the option to designate this product as a Storable Product or Service. If this product was a Service, other fields appear. First, we would decide if anything should be created when we click on the Create on Order field. By default, the 'Nothing' option is selected, but Odoo can also create a task, project and task, or just a project whenever this item is purchased. Doing so would let our employees know via the integrated Projects application that there's a recently ordered service that requires their attention. Then they can start servicing the customer promptly without getting lost in the shuffle, so to speak.
We also have different Invoicing Policy options. We could choose to invoice the customer with a prepaid/fixed price, which is the default option, or we can choose to have our invoice based off of Milestones or on Delivered Quantities. The last two options, based on milestones and based on delivered quantities, are directly related to how our employees invoice the customer as they deliver the ordered service to the customer. Perhaps there are certain milestones that can be reached throughout the service and we want to invoice the customer whenever one of those is reached. For example, if they ordered a remodeling service, we could invoice them after an initial estimate, then after the demolition is finished, and so on. The same mentality can be applied to an invoicing policy for 'based on delivered quantities,' only with that policy it would be related to specific quantities related to the service that has been delivered as opposed to the predetermined milestones.
Below that, we have the Plan Services checkbox. When that's ticked, an additional field appears. This is where we can select a specific employee role that Odoo would plan shifts for should the service be ordered. For example, if this was a troubleshooting service, we'd assign our maintenance technician and Odoo would instantly plan a shift for them via the integrated Planning app whenever this is ordered. Makes sense, right?
Configuring Storable Products
But let's go ahead and switch this product type back to Storable Product because obviously a chair is not a service. If we didn't need to track the exact quantity of an item, for example, like how many pens there are in the office, we could bypass the tracking option entirely. But since we want to keep track of our modern office chairs, we'll go ahead and select 'Track Inventory'. When we do, various smart buttons and fields appear, allowing us to have more options on how we want to track the inventory.
The default option is 'By Quantity', but we could also track it by 'Lots' or 'Unique Serial Numbers', but we'll keep it set to 'By Quantity' for now. Then we can choose some Storable Product-specific invoicing options. Here in the Invoicing Policy, we can invoice the customer based off of ordered quantities or delivered quantities. We'll keep it on the default 'ordered quantities' option so we can invoice the customer right after they've placed their order without having to wait for it to be delivered.
On the right side of the General Information tab, we have some financial-related fields. These stay the same regardless of what product type is chosen. We'll add a sales price of $75 and we'll keep the default 15% sales tax for this video. We'll also bypass the Avatax category. If you want to learn more about that, be sure to check out our documentation. We'll also skip over Cost and Purchase Taxes fields for now because we're solely focused on adding this product for the video.
In the Category field, we'll go ahead and type 'Office Furniture' and select 'All / Saleable / Office Furniture'. This product to the other products in the Internal Category field. And if we want to add a specific reference, which is where SKUs or barcodes is related to UPC, we do those in the respective field here. Now, if you're working in a multi-company environment and want to select this product for a specific company, then you'd add that specific company in this field here. However, if you leave it blank, it'll be visible to all companies in the database.
Lastly, if we wanted to add any internal notes for our employees about the product, we'd enter them in this field here at the bottom. Like, for example, we could put 'my fave chair'.
Attributes, Variants, and Upselling Strategies
Jumping up into the Attributes and Variants tab, we can add different colors or materials if applicable. For example, let's say we also have a red version of this product. So we can click 'Add a line', put 'Color' for the attribute, and in the value section here, we can add 'Red'.
Now, hopping into the Sales tab, we can customize this even further. In the Upsell & Cross-Sell section here, we can add optional, accessory, and alternative products. The Optional Products field allows you to add complimentary products that will be recommended to the customer during checkout to hopefully entice them to add it to their cart. Since this is a chair, we can add the 'Customizable Desk' to the optional field because chairs and desks go nicely together, wouldn't you say?
In the Accessories field here directly below, we'll add a supplemental item that enhances the chair's use. For example, we can add our 'Floor Protection' for the chair here.
For the Alternative Products field, this is where we can suggest similar products for our customers which they can consider during the transaction process. So since this is a chair, let's go ahead and add our 'Conference Chair' here.
In the eCommerce section to the right, we can select what website it appears on and we can categorize it, making it easier for our customers to search for and find. Below that, we have the option to continue selling this item even if it's out of stock, and we can also show how many of this item is left in our inventory. We even have the option to create an out-of-stock message that's shown to our customers when we run out of this product.
eCommerce, Inventory, and Accounting Tabs
In the 'eCommerce Shop' section, we can add tags to our item, which adds to the additional organization of our products on our eCommerce store. So for this product, let's go ahead and add 'Office' and 'Chair'. You can also add as many tags as you'd like.
Next, in the 'Extra Product Media' section, we can add any supplemental content for this product to be shown alongside it on our eCommerce store. This could be other images or even a product video.
Moving to the Inventory tab, this is where various fields are related to the operations and logistics of the tab, like a specific inventory route which appears when other apps like Purchase and Manufacturing are installed. There are also fields designated to the product's weight, volume, and more, which are important to know for shipping logistic operations that occur elsewhere in Odoo. For the sake of time though, I'm just going to show you where these fields are and you can check out our inventory tutorials and documentation to learn more.
Lastly, in the Accounting tab, this is where you can designate the income and expense accounts for this specific product, allowing us to automatically track the income and expense information related to the product in the Accounting application.
Publishing the Product to the Website
Now, at the top of the form, you'll find various analytical smart buttons for different metrics related to the product. These populate with data as the product gets stored and purchased. Amongst those is the 'Go to Website' smart button. You'll notice that right now it's red, which means that the product is not published, making it impossible for customers to view or buy on our website. So let's change that now.
We'll go ahead and click the 'Go to Website' smart button, which takes us to the product page of our online store. We would still want to add a product description and more details here, but we can publish this right away and work on that later. To do this, at the top of the page, you'll see that this toggle switch is 'Unpublished'. When we click that toggle switch, it now changes to 'Published', and our product is now ready to be seen, bought, and enjoyed by our customers.
And there you have it, Odoo-ers. That's how you create and publish a product in Odoo Sales. Stay tuned for more awesome tutorials to learn even more about this amazing application. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.
