From Shopify to Alokai with Odoo

Executive summary

Shopify is unbeatable for speed-to-launch, but its ease of use comes at the price of rising revenue-based fees and limited backend extensibility.

A composable architecture built on Alokai (formerly Vue Storefront) and Odoo gives merchants full control of the customer experience and business workflows—often paying for itself within 24 months.

1. Why merchants outgrow Shopify

• Variable platform fee on Plus (0.3 – 0.4 % of GMV): Margin compression as sales scale
• Transaction surcharge once revenue passes $800 k / month: Extra 0.25 % on every sale
• Long-term contracts for enterprise features: Road-map and pricing locked in for years
• Closed database & limited ERP integration: Manual work or expensive middleware

2. What Alokai brings to the table

• Headless & framework-agnostic. Built with Vue 3, Nuxt and a GraphQL API layer, it decouples the storefront from your backend stack.
• Inexpensive hosting Being a simple node.js base app, it's easy to scale and there a several platforms that reduce the technical complexity.
• Performance & SEO. Edge-rendered pages routinely hit 90 + Core Web Vitals, lifting conversion rates.

3. Why pair Alokai with Odoo

A modern storefront is only half the puzzle; you still need a back office that can scale. Odoo 18 delivers a full ERP in one code-base:

What Odoo does out of the box

• Inventory & Shipping: Generates labels, rates and tracking numbers for carriers like DHL, FedEx, DPD, etc., straight from the pick-list.
• Order Management & WMS: Barcode-driven wave picking and real-time stock reservations
• Accounting: 26 000 + banks pre-integrated, auto-imports statements and matches 95 % of payments automatically
• Helpdesk: Multichannel ticketing with SLAs, canned replies and escalation rules
• **CRM, Marketing, Subscriptions, Field Service: ** All nice applications companies usually need, fully integrated.

The payoff: one login, one data model, zero plugin roulette.

“After years of juggling twenty-plus Shopify apps, having shipping, accounting, support and inventory inside Odoo feels like breathing room.”
— Head of Operations, fashion brand (8 M €/yr GMV)

Try it yourself

• Hands-on demo: Alokai + Odoo sandbox
• Try with Docker Compose: The best way to understand the cechnical stack
• Architecture deep-dive: ERPGap – Vue Storefront to Odoo connector

4. Hosting is no longer the bottleneck

Containerised deployments let you run each service independently on platforms such as Google Cloud Run, AWS Fargate, Render, etc. These services auto-scale down to zero and bill per second, so infrastructure costs stay predictable even during traffic spikes. Community playbooks for Alokai and Odoo cover health checks, blue-green deploys and background workers, making DevOps almost hands-free.

5. Customisation cost & ROI

Both solutions require custom development; although adopting Alokai demands a higher upfront budget, most merchants who pair it with Odoo recoup their investment within roughly two years. Most frequently you will get your money back sooner if you consider the advantage of having all your operation in only one system. Being a full ERP, Odoo has solid modular system where you can manage anything.

Why the payback is quick

1. Lower variable fees. Replacing Shopify’s 0.25 – 0.40 % GMV levy with a fixed cloud bill saves six figures for seven- and eight-figure stores.
2. Fewer SaaS subscriptions. Built-in Odoo apps (Helpdesk, Subscription, Marketing Automation) replace multiple third-party tools.
3. Agility revenue lift. Faster content releases and experimental UX changes boost conversion without negotiation cycles.

Get all Odoo website features

• Multi-website and multi-currency and localisations: You can have multiple websites, different languages and currencies
• Multi-warehouse: Manage multiple warehouses and tree structured locations
• Multi-company: You can even have different companies in different countries
• Powerful price lists: Odoo price lists allow you to configure your prices and promotions in the way you need
• Loyalty cards and coupons: Manage loyalty cards and coupons, B2B, B2C and much more.

6. Migration roadmap at a glance

1. Audit data models, custom apps and checkout flows.
2. Stand up Odoo in staging; sync products, customers and orders via Shopify API.
3. Build Alokai theme with pixel-perfect parity to current brand.
4. Progressive cut-over:
   • phase 1 – headless storefront on top of Shopify;
   • phase 2 – switch API endpoint to Odoo;
   • phase 3 – retire Shopify subscription.
5. Post-launch optimisation: PWA features, one-tap checkout, edge caching.

7. Key takeaways

• Shopify’s simplicity turns costly at scale.
• A composable stack with Alokai + Odoo restores ownership of data and roadmap.
• Modern serverless hosting removes infrastructure headaches.
• Most merchants we assist see an ROI inside 24 months—even after the larger upfront build budget.

Ready to explore? Drop us a note and we’ll map out what a phased migration could look like for your brand.