SYDNEY, 22 Sept. OpenSolar, a software company focused on empowering solar installers with an accurate and cost-free solar design and sales platform, and Solar Outlet, Australia’s largest online distributor for solar panels, inverters, batteries and complete kits, have announced a partnership.
Together they will provide an all-in-one solution for designing, selling and purchasing for solar projects.
“Our integration will remove a significant amount of guesswork and manual data entry by the solar professional. According to one of the early beta testers, it’s easier than ordering a pizza online,” said Jimi Gatland, Light Touch Solar.
After projects are designed and sold on the OpenSolar platform, solar professionals can add the entire kit list instantly to the new OpenSolar cart and buy the equipment from Solar Outlet. The system provides real-time equipment availability as they design, allowing them to sell only what they know they can install.
In addition to per-project purchasing, the new hardware ordering function simplifies bulk ordering while still allowing professionals to enjoy their usual trade prices and discounts, but without pen and paper tracking and time-consuming phone calls.
“A fast-moving market like Australia needs better tools that take less time,” said Rami Fedda, co-founder of Solar Juice, parent company to Solar Outlet.
“That’s why we are excited to partner with OpenSolar and offer a design solution that provides stock updates and product alternatives in real time so that solar professionals can sell products that are actually in stock, and avoid costly change orders.”
“Solar Pros have one of the hardest and most important jobs in the world”, said Maaike Gobel, Head of Asia Pacific at OpenSolar. “Yesterday’s hardware ordering tools involved using pen and paper to manage their stock, making phone calls to distributors to get the best prices, and spending time double and triple-checking their orders to ensure accuracy.
“But today all that hassle goes away. We want to see a world powered by sunshine, so it’s critical that barriers to productivity are removed.”
Hardware ordering on OpenSolar is intended to continue to break down silos in the solar installer’s workflow so that their businesses can grow unimpeded. This post-sale functionality is offered at no additional cost to the professionals or their customers, just like the rest of OpenSolar’s free-of-charge design and sales platform.
Solar professionals on OpenSolar can go to pages.opensolar.com/partners/solar-outlet to learn more about the hardware ordering feature and how to get started. To create an OpenSolar account, solar businesses can register on OpenSolar.com.