Open Mercato

Most companies past a few dozen employees fall into the same pattern: sales lives in Excel or a CRM, operations run in a completely different tool, the warehouse keeps its own records, and finance receives data late and in a format that has to be manually re-entered. Every department has its own system, and nobody has a complete picture of what's actually happening in the business.

This isn't an organizational problem - it's a problem of tool architecture. ERP systems from the previous decade were built on the assumption that a company's processes are stable and predictable, and that a system configured once won't need to change for years. Reality looks different: companies shift their sales models, enter new markets, add B2B channels, and every such change ends either in an expensive customization project with the vendor or in yet another spreadsheet patching over the gaps.

What is Open Mercato?

Open Mercato is an open-source platform for building business systems that combines ready-made CRM, ERP, and OMS modules with the flexibility to extend them for a company's specific needs - without ever touching the platform's core code. In practice, this means a company gets a working system in weeks rather than months, and can develop it independently or with vendor support in exactly the direction it needs, without being tied to anyone's product roadmap.

The platform is built around the philosophy of "start with a ready-made 80%." From day one, companies get a sales module, contact pipeline, order management, PIM integration (including Akeneo), field-level data encryption, multi-tenant support, a built-in AI assistant based on MCP, and a B2B customer portal with individual pricing and order history. The remaining 20% is configuration for the company's specific processes and any integrations with existing systems. A standard implementation takes between 4 and 14 weeks, depending on scale and the number of integrations.

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Modular architecture: start with the ready-made 80%

Most ERP and CRM platforms share the same problem: adapting them to specific business needs requires either paying the vendor for customization or modifying the source code - which then blocks future updates. Every change becomes expensive, and every version upgrade carries the risk of breaking something.

Open Mercato takes a different approach. The platform is built around an overlay module system - a mechanism that allows companies to add their own modules, pages, entities, and validation logic without touching the platform's core. When the Open Mercato team releases a new version, companies simply update, and their custom extensions remain untouched. There's no conflict between "what the vendor delivers" and "what we built on top." Modules communicate through an event system, each providing its own database schemas, UI logic, and validation, with no dependency on what other modules are doing.

In practice, a company starting with Open Mercato gets a fully working CRM with sales pipelines, product catalog management, an order module with integrations for external payment and shipping providers, multi-tenant support, and field-level encryption for sensitive data - all from day one. That's the 80%. The remaining 20% is configuration for specific processes, integrations with existing systems, and any custom modules built by the company's development team.

CRM and sales in one place

The CRM module in Open Mercato covers the entire sales cycle: from the first contact, through sales opportunities organized into configurable pipeline stages, to closing deals and maintaining a full history of the customer relationship. Pipelines are drag-and-drop, stages are defined freely, and each opportunity has a linked interaction timeline, notes, documents, and related orders - all in a single view.

The system supports multiple pipelines simultaneously, which matters for companies selling different products through different processes or managing both B2B customers and partner projects at the same time. Each pipeline has its own stages, custom fields, and automation rules.

Order Management System (OMS): from order to fulfillment

Open Mercato includes a built-in OMS module that handles the entire order flow: from quoting and negotiating terms, through confirmation, fulfillment, and shipping, all the way to invoicing and post-sale support. Whether an order comes in through the B2B customer portal, is placed by a sales rep in the CRM, or arrives through an external sales channel, it lands in a single queue and is processed through the same workflow. There's no situation where one channel's orders live in a spreadsheet while another's are in the system because nobody got around to integrating them yet.

The platform includes a ready-made adapter for shipping provider integrations, covering rate retrieval, shipment creation, tracking, and carrier webhook handling. Payments work the same way - instead of building integrations from scratch, companies simply configure pre-built connectors for their providers. PIM integration is another key piece: product data - descriptions, images, variants, pricing, and stock levels - flows into the OMS directly from a single source of truth, with no manual re-entry and no risk of an order being accepted for a product with outdated information or zero availability.

Artificial intelligence as a business assistant

Open Mercato has a built-in AI assistant based on MCP - the Model Context Protocol. In short, this means the assistant isn't a chatbot bolted onto the side of the system. It's a tool that understands the platform's data structure, knows the entity schemas, is aware of what APIs exist, and can act on them directly. The difference is fundamental: instead of receiving a generic answer generated from a language model's general knowledge, users get answers grounded in real data from their own system.

The practical applications are concrete. You can ask the assistant for a list of customers who haven't placed an order in over 60 days and have an open pipeline above a certain value. You can ask it to update the status of several sales opportunities at once. You can generate a summary of last month's sales activity without opening a single report. The platform uses Meilisearch for full-text search with vector support, which means natural language queries run fast even across large datasets. What sets Open Mercato's approach apart from the typical "AI feature" that's been bolted onto ERP and CRM systems in recent years is that the platform's architecture was designed with AI in mind from the start. Every module includes human- and model-readable documentation defining extensibility contracts and coding standards. The result is that the assistant doesn't just answer questions - it can also help with extending the system itself, because it understands its structure at a level that would normally take a new developer weeks to reach.

Data security: field-level encryption

Most ERP and CRM systems encrypt data in transit and at rest, which sounds reassuring but inpractice means that communication between the server and client is secured and files on disk are encrypted. If someone gains access to the database, they can see all data for all customers in one place. Open Mercato works differently.

The platform implements field-level encryption using AES-GCM, with each tenant holding their own unique encryption key. In practical terms, this means that even in a multi-tenant environment where dozens of companies share a single instance, a database breach doesn't expose other tenants' data. Customer A's data cannot be decrypted with Customer B's key. Encryption and decryption happen automatically at the ORM level - through hooks in MikroORM - with no additional logic required in the application code. A developer simply marks which fields should be encrypted in the configuration, and from that point on the system handles it automatically on every read and write. To avoid blocking searches on encrypted fields, the platform generates deterministic hashes - for example, for email addresses - allowing lookups without decrypting entire records.

Administrators can use the management panel to specify which columns - both system-level and custom - should be encrypted. This matters for GDPR compliance, as companies often need to demonstrate that specific categories of personal data are protected in a defined way. Open Mercato provides that capability without requiring a custom implementation.

Open Mercato vs. traditional ERP/CRM systems

When a company decides it needs a proper system for managing sales and operations, the natural first step is to look at the well-known names: SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics. These are proven platforms with long track records and broad partner ecosystems. The trouble starts when the company tries to fit its processes to the system rather than the other way around.

The core difference isn't about features - t the level of a capabilities checklist, the big systems have everything. It comes down to who controls the system, who pays for every change, and how quickly a company can respond to its own needs without waiting on someone else.

Who is Open Mercato for?

Open Mercato isn't a tool for everyone, and its creators don't pretend otherwise. To get the most out of it, a company needs access to a development team - even an external one - to set up and configure the system. In return, they get a platform that can be developed in exactly the direction the business needs, with no constraints imposed by a vendor. The profiles that get the most out of Open Mercato:

• Software houses and tech agencies building custom systems for clients, who need a solid foundation instead of starting every project from scratch.
• B2B companies with non-standard sales processes, where off-the-shelf CRMs require so many workarounds that maintaining them becomes more expensive than building something tailored.
• Startups and scale-ups that want a working system up and running quickly, but know that their processes will look completely different in a year and need a platform that can keep up.
• Companies with strict data security requirements - in healthcare or finance, for example - where field-level encryption and full infrastructure control are a requirement, not a nice-to-have.
• Organizations migrating from legacy ERP systems that don't want to fall into another vendor lock-in and are looking for a solution built to last.