Order management systems: The benefits for online and multi-channel retailers
As competition becomes fiercer and customers more demanding, many online and multi-channel retailers are looking for ways to simplify their day-to-day and ensure faster, more accurate order fulfilment.
This ongoing quest for optimisation only becomes more imperative as order volumes grow and legacy systems become more cumbersome and error prone.
At a certain point, the increasing complexity of tasks like tracking orders across multiple channels and ensuring stock levels are always on point require the help of new, innovative ways of doing business.
In this article, we share how an order management system (OMS) can provide this innovative solution – one that solves the most pressing pain points of ecommerce businesses and helps them save time and enhance customer service.
Order management systems explained
An order management system (OMS) is software that helps online retailers, third-party logistics (3PL) providers and warehouses automate and simplify processes across the order fulfilment lifecycle. It provides real-time insights into customer orders and inventory, with the ability to consolidate multiple sales channels in one platform.
An OMS ensures all your sales channels remain up to date based on the inventory you have in stock, eliminating the need to perform manual stock takes. It allows you to set smart rules to automate stock replenishments or select couriers, while also optimising processes like picking and packing.
In essence, it's a tool that helps businesses – particularly those experiencing growing order volumes – fulfil customer orders as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible. It helps eliminate time-consuming, error-prone manual tasks and centralises all your sales channels and courier platforms in one place, allowing you to efficiently handle a growing number of orders and gain more control of your fulfilment processes.
5 benefits of an order management system
If your order volumes are growing, you may be realising that your current systems and workflows are becoming ever more inefficient and cumbersome. Tracking sales across multiple platforms and manually ensuring all sales channels are in sync with inventory data is likely costing you countless hours of effort.
It is challenges like these that an order management system can help solve, in addition to automating countless other processes and improving fulfilment accuracy. An OMS can help you:
1. Centralise marketplaces and couriers in one place
An order management system makes it far easier to track and manage your sales channels and couriers. The most advanced systems feature in-built integrations with popular ecommerce channels like Amazon, TikTok, Shopify, WooCommerce and eBay so you can view all your sales channels in a single dashboard, without the need to log into multiple platforms.
An OMS can also consolidate your courier and multi-carrier relationships to give you a single view of all your deliveries. You can even set rules so the system automatically selects the most cost-efficient delivery partners, while also automatically providing the customer with their shipment tracking information.
2. Ensure always-on order fulfilment
One of the biggest breakthroughs an OMS can achieve for your business is that it ensures orders can be fulfilled all day, every day – even when you are not at the helm of operations.
It removes the need for you to be at your keyboard monitoring incoming sales, manually updating your inventory, processing payments and organising couriers. An order management system ensures all these processes take place seamlessly without manual intervention.
3. Enhance stock control
Manually tracking orders and updating your inventory only becomes more cumbersome and error-prone as order volumes grow – particularly if you are selling across multiple channels. This is where the integration offered by an OMS can help.
The system automatically pushes out stock levels to all your ecommerce channels at regular intervals, which means they are synchornised with your inventory. It can also help you forecast demand for certain products so you can plan stock orders accordingly, as well as optimise warehouse space and streamline the management of multiple stock locations.
With an OMS, you will always have real-time visibility of what stock you have on hand and where it is located.
4. Save time and reduce errors
As your business grows, manually monitoring multiple sales channels and updating inventory with every order is not only time-intensive, but also comes with the risk of human error. An OMS can integrate all your sales channels so you can track everything from a single dashboard, while notifications keep you up to date on sales and order progress.
Because the system automatically updates your inventory with every sale, no matter which channel it came through, you always have an accurate view of stock on hand. This eliminates the risk of ordering too little or too much stock based on faulty information.
5. Identify in-demand items
An order management system is a powerful tool for identifying your most popular items. It can utilise data on sales, customer preferences and market trends to provide visibility into shifts in demand, so you can adjust your inventory and adapt your marketing strategies to capitalise on new opportunities.
5 signs it’s time to consider an order management system
By now, you should have a solid understanding of the main benefits an OMS can provide. But what specific order fulfilment pain points can it solve? Here, we explore the most common, and if they sound familiar to you, it is likely a sign you should consider implementing an OMS.
1. More sales channels mean more problems
While adding more sales channels can expose your business to new legions of customers, the prospect of countless admin tasks may make you hesitant to do so. Adding another sales channel will simply mean you have one more site to log in to, track and manage.
By centralising all your sales channels in one platform, an order management system makes it possible to add new channels without also taking on more admin. Automatic notifications keep you up to date when an order is placed, sent for picking and packing, and shipped, regardless of which channel it came through.
This means there is no more need to manually track different sales channels to ensure orders are fulfilled.
2. Organising deliveries is complex and time-consuming
From grappling with high shipping costs and meeting fast delivery expectations to maintaining accurate inventory across multiple channels, shipping comes with a range of complexities.
By integrating with various shipping carriers and logistics partners, an OMS automatically selects the most cost-effective and efficient shipping method based on predefined criteria such as destination, package weight and delivery time. It also provides real-time shipping rate calculations so you can accurately quote shipping costs to customers during the checkout process.
An order management system can automatically generate shipping labels and other documentation. Plus, it can optimise order routing by intelligently allocating orders to fulfillment centers or warehouses based on factors such as proximity to the customer, inventory availability and shipping costs.
You can also define shipping rules and preferences based on customer segmentation, order value or shipping destination. For example, you can offer free shipping for orders above a certain threshold or expedited shipping options for time-sensitive orders.
An OMS also provides order tracking and communication capabilities to keep customers informed about the status of their shipments.
3. You've experienced multiple stockouts
Ensuring you have enough stock on hand to fulfil every order is made all the more complex when selling across multiple channels. Manually updating stock on each channel not only drains your time but comes with the risk of human error, which can lead to ordering too much or too little stock.
An order management system solves this problem by automatically synchronising multiple sales channels with your inventory data, saving you countless time and effort and helping to minimise the risk of stockouts.
4. Human error is leading to incorrect orders
Whether it is entering the wrong figures into a spreadsheet or packing the wrong item into a parcel, mistakes are inevitable when order fulfilment processes are manually performed. And these only become more frequent as your order volumes grow.
An OMS is designed to eliminate as many manual processes as possible. As mentioned previously, the system can ensure inventory levels are always accurate and up to date. It can also integrate marketplaces, shopping carts and even accounting and ERP solutions so there is no need to perform data entry across platforms.
Plus, an OMS can help enhance picking and packing accuracy by facilitating barcode scanning, while also automating the process of creating invoices and other customer documents.
5. You are consumed with admin tasks
By automating various stages of the order fulfillment process, including order capture, inventory management, processing and shipping, an OMS significantly reduces the need for manual data entry and processing.
It automates the generation and printing of essential documents like pick lists, packing slips and shipping labels based on predefined templates. This automation not only accelerates the fulfillment process but also reduces the risk of errors and ensures consistency in documentation across orders.
An order management system can also automate the generation and distribution of invoices. Plus, it can streamline returns management by automating the process of issuing return authorisations, processing returned items and updating inventory accordingly.
Transform order fulfilment with Access Mintsoft
Our cloud-based order management system Access Mintsoft helps online retailers worldwide eliminate unnecessary admin, simplify multi-channel selling and deliver faster, more accurate customer service.
Seamlessly integrating with over 175 couriers, platforms and marketplaces, the solution consolidates all your sales channels in one place, ensuring they are always in sync with your inventory.
Access Mintsoft also automates the creation of shipping labels and order/customer documentation, as well as invoicing clients. While advanced data analytics capabilities make tracking sales volumes, inventory and work rates a breeze.
Watch Video: Top 4 ways Mintsoft can help automate your order and warehouse processes
Book a demo today to see how Access Mintsoft can help your business.
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