Let’s say I am using magento for ecommerce & dropship model. When a customer purchases, that is a sales order in magento. Then in magento it will trigger a purchase order to my merchants so they can fulfill the orders. While looking at this scope, it has a complete sales order, purchase order, delivery order and some basic warehouse functionalities.
The question is, how does ERPNext come to this picture? or erp per say? Is ERP suppose to manage just accounting part of it? If yes, why not just integrate to quickbooks?
Anyone can provide some use cases or examples?
For non ecommerce, it makes sense to use ERP for business. Just not sure how it applies to ecommerce business?
You are free to use Magento or Opencart for strong eCommerce features. But CRM, Stock, Accounts, Support, Alerts, HR are not available in Magento or any eCommerce engine with strong edge. There ERPNext comes into picture. ERPNext can easily manage these operational activities and you can keep Magento or any eCommerce engine in front end for selling your products.
but i am curious, whatever features you mentioned above… i noticed like magento, they have most of it… example stocks, warehouse, etc. For accounts and HR makes sense it’s outside the scope. I am thinking is erp should be on the 2nd phase after the ecommerce part. Or should it work parallel?
Instead of saying 2nd part, you can say eCommerce portal acts as a front portal for all shopping. ERPNext acts as a backend engine for managing all transactions and inventory and rest other things. It works in parallel.
@ericmachine88 this question is much conceptual and personal! If you only sell your products in your website, and dont need Invoice, Delivery, Stock Management, Analisis of Costs, a ecommerce can fit your needs. But if you need sell your products in many stores like Amazon, Ebay, AliExpress etc, your site and others, you will need something as a backend to manage the complexity of maintain these websites.
The advantage of a ERP is regarding the quality of information, since it can give to you a full vision about your business! But it requires some effort to reach this level of information.
So again, if you fell that a ecommerce will fit all of your requirements, go ahead with it!
If you need more detailed information about your business and your management, a ERP will give it to you!
First of all, eCommerce solution mainly focus on shopping cart management. How you promote and sales your products via internet. Thats it. The most it connected to the back end inventory system.
Whereas ERP system is an integrated/interconnected solution of all your business functional processes, such as Accounting, HR, Sales, Purchasing, CRM, Production etc. The good thing of ERP system (such as ERPNext), allow also to connect to the eCommerce module.
ERP solution can be a complete solution for a business but eCommerce solution just only part of your business process.
i see, well my ecommerce model is more towards dropship (basically my merchants will fulfil the orders for me).
does that mean my merchant needs to login to erpnext to fulfill the order? So they can print out the PO, DO, etc? emailing them is not a good choice as that could lose track stuff,
I presume merchant login is not part of the current erpnext out of the box scope?
@ericmachine88 so you are a middle man ? mostly your merchants have their own erp software so they will do all the work from there and will not let you see the costs …etc
what you will be using in the ERP is invoicing, pricing, accounting, suppliers as your merchants and CRM.
so you will be benefited from almost all the features of the ERPnext without even going to the eCommerce subject.
anyhow frappe team did say that there will be a new POS in V7 so i hope it would add the functions of the eCommerce everyone need in it.
hope as good as Odoo POS 
