Dropshipping reverses the normal order of stock. Instead of buying a product, receiving it into your warehouse, and shipping it out again when a customer orders, the supplier ships directly to the customer and the goods never touch your shelves. In Odoo that idea is not a separate app or a plugin. It is a route: a product configured so that confirming a sales order automatically raises a purchase document, and the resulting transfer runs from a vendor location to a customer location instead of through your stock. Set it up correctly and the whole chain — sale, purchase, delivery confirmation, and invoicing — stays linked inside one system. Set it up halfway and you get the classic failures: sales orders with no purchase order behind them, or a transfer waiting on stock you were never supposed to hold.
What dropshipping means in Odoo terms
Three pieces of Odoo machinery do all the work. First, the product carries a Dropship route, which tells procurement that demand for this product should be satisfied by purchasing, not by reserving stock on hand. Second, the product has a vendor on its Purchase tab, because a route that says “buy it” is useless unless Odoo knows who to buy it from and at what price. Third, the transfer that records the delivery is a special one: its source location is Partners/Vendors and its destination is Partners/Customers. That pair of virtual locations is the whole trick. Because the goods move vendor-to-customer on paper, your on-hand quantity never rises and never falls, yet the movement is still recorded, dated, and traceable from both the sales order and the purchase order.
This also explains what dropshipping is not. It is not a way to sell products with no supplier record, and it is not the same as the Buy route or Replenish on Order (MTO). The Buy route brings goods into your stock to fulfil demand; MTO also receives into stock before delivery. Only the Dropship route skips your warehouse entirely. You can enable Dropship alongside Buy on the same product, which gives you a per-order choice between stocking the item and having the vendor ship it — useful for products you normally hold but occasionally source direct for a large or remote order.
Step 1: Turn the feature on
Start in the Purchase app. Go to Configuration > Settings, find the Logistics section, enable Dropshipping, and save. Until this setting is on, the Dropship route is not available to assign to products, which is the single most common reason a first attempt appears to do nothing. No other setting is strictly required for the basic flow in Odoo 17, although companies that also want to choose routes per sales order line, or run multi-step warehouse flows, will already have the advanced routes options enabled in Inventory settings.
Step 2: Configure the product
Open the product you want to dropship, or create a new one, and check three things in order:
- General information: both Can be Sold and Can be Purchased must be enabled. A product that cannot be purchased can never generate the purchase side of the flow.
- Purchase tab: add at least one vendor line with the vendor and the price they charge you. You may add several vendors, but be aware that the vendor at the top of the list is the one Odoo selects automatically for the generated purchase order. Order this list deliberately; it is a sourcing decision, not decoration.
- Inventory tab: in the Routes section, tick Dropship. Optionally tick Buy as well if you want the stocking alternative described above.
While you are on the Purchase tab, set the vendor's delivery lead time realistically. Odoo uses lead times to schedule the expected delivery date, and dropship promises are only as good as the vendor's real dispatch time plus transit. A zero-day lead time makes every order look instantly deliverable and trains your sales team to over-promise. Also confirm the product's unit of measure matches what the vendor sells; a mismatch here surfaces later as quantities that look wrong on the purchase order.
Step 3: Run an order through the flow
With the product configured, the day-to-day workflow has four stages:
- Confirm the sales order. Create a quotation containing the dropshipped product and confirm it. Odoo automatically generates a request for quotation (RfQ) to purchase the product from the configured vendor. You do not create this document by hand. On the sales order, the Purchase smart button takes you straight to the linked RfQ.
- Confirm the purchase order. Review the RfQ — vendor, price, quantity, and the customer's delivery details — then confirm it. It becomes a purchase order, and Odoo creates the linked dropship receipt, visible through the Dropship smart button on the purchase order.
- The vendor ships. Outside Odoo, the vendor picks, packs, and sends the goods to your customer. Your job in this stage is communication: the vendor needs the correct customer address, and the customer needs to know the parcel is coming from a third party.
- Validate the dropship receipt. Once the product has actually been delivered to the customer, open the dropship receipt and click Validate to confirm the delivered quantity. To see everything waiting, go to the Inventory Overview dashboard and click the # TO PROCESS button on the Dropship card.
Two details in that sequence matter more than they look. Validate only on real delivery, not on dispatch and not when the purchase order is confirmed: validation is the event that marks the sales order line as delivered, and it drives what can be invoiced. And if the vendor ships in parts, record partial quantities honestly — validate what arrived and let the remainder stay open, rather than validating in full to make the screen tidy. The documents are the audit trail your customer service team will rely on when a buyer asks where an order is.
Money, stock, and traceability
Because the transfer runs vendor-to-customer, validated dropship deliveries leave your on-hand stock untouched, which is exactly what you want for goods you never held. What you do get is a complete document chain: the sales order knows its purchase order, the purchase order knows its dropship receipt, and the stock moves on that receipt prove quantity and date. On the financial side there are two independent documents to manage — the customer invoice raised from the sales order, governed by the product's invoicing policy, and the vendor bill raised from the purchase order. Keep both in view. A dropship business that invoices customers promptly but lets vendor bills pile up unrecorded will misread its margin on every order, because the cost side lives on the purchase document, not in warehouse valuation.
Returns deserve a decision before the first order, not after the first complaint. A returned dropshipped item is not coming back into a bin in your warehouse unless you deliberately receive it there. Decide with each vendor who receives returns, who pays for the return shipping, and how you will record it in Odoo, then write that agreement down. The system can record whichever physical flow you choose; it cannot choose the commercial terms for you.
Common mistakes and a pre-flight checklist
- No RfQ appears after confirming the sale. Check, in order: the Dropshipping setting is on, the product has the Dropship route, the product can be purchased, and a vendor exists. One missing piece stops the chain silently.
- The wrong vendor or price is used. The first vendor line on the Purchase tab wins. Reorder the lines, and keep vendor prices current — the generated RfQ inherits them.
- Staff validate receipts too early. Validation means delivered. Train the team, and review the Dropship card on the Inventory dashboard daily so pending deliveries are chased, not forgotten.
- Customer addresses reach the vendor incomplete. The vendor ships to the address on the order. Verify delivery addresses at quotation stage, especially for gift and business-site deliveries.
- Lead times are fiction. Set vendor lead times from measured performance and revisit them. Promised dates are computed from these values.
Before going live, run one end-to-end test order with a real product and a cooperative vendor: confirm the sale, confirm the purchase, follow the smart buttons in both directions, validate a partial quantity, and check that invoicing reflects only what was delivered. Fifteen minutes on a test order is cheaper than untangling your first real customer's documents.
When dropshipping is the right tool
Dropshipping in Odoo suits products that are bulky, slow-moving, highly varied, or supplied by vendors who are simply better at logistics than you are. It is a poor fit when you need to inspect goods before they reach customers, when vendors cannot reliably share dispatch and delivery information, or when delivery speed from your own shelf is your competitive advantage. The configuration above takes minutes; the vendor relationships behind it are the real work. Choose vendors whose delivery performance you have measured, keep their prices and lead times in Odoo current, and the route will do the rest — every order routed straight from supplier to customer, with the paperwork to prove it.
