The lines between in-store and online shopping have blurred as consumer buying behaviors continue to shift. Consumers expect the same buying experience with your brand across any interaction—whether on their phones or in your store. Successfully and seamlessly meeting these expectations requires an order management system (OMS).
Every retailer, whether operating in a single channel or across several channels, needs distributed order management to ensure they can meet customer expectations. Single-channel retailers need distributed order management to optimize inventory tracking and customer satisfaction. For multi-channel retailers, the need for an OMS becomes even more apparent. This is where inventory segmentation, strategic sourcing and fulfillment and a seamless omnichannel customer experience come into play. A distributed order management system streamlines all of these processes for a superior buying experience.
While merchants of all sizes (small, mid-market, enterprise) and types (B2B, B2C, DTC) use an OMS to ensure their order management process runs smoothly and efficiently, an OMS offers critical benefits for an organization operating in the mid-market arena to achieve success such as speed of delivery, low total cost of ownership and flexibility.
Leveraging the Right Technology
Leveraging the right enabling technology is critical. An agile OMS built from the ground up as microservices architecture on a common data model and integration framework is required to rapidly integrate, speed time to value and ROI and provide the requisite agility and scalability. An omnichannel OMS on an agile unified commerce platform is not only the cornerstone solution for retailers to rapidly adopt and advance omnichannel fulfillment options, but also mandatory for making omnichannel fulfillment profitable.
Understanding Up-Front Investment
With a cloud native application, the working capital to stand up BOPIS and ship from store locations is relatively inexpensive. With an investment of only $1,500 or less for a laser printer shipping corrugate, case tape gun and dunnage, a store can be fully operational in hours, not days or weeks. Thus, for a 250-store chain with an average order value of $75 and 25 daily orders per location, the retailer is driving $468.75 per day in sales. In a time like this, what would a half million dollars mean to your business? While these systems require an initial investment in time and resources, it’s important to view it as an investment rather than a cost, as it has a net positive impact on business.
An order management software is critical for mid-market retailers to tie your commerce tools and customer experience together and enable speed of delivery and the flexibility to pivot quickly, while providing a low total cost of ownership.
Order management is more than a buzzword in commerce— it is the thread that unifies your commerce tools and joins your customer experience together. As consumer shopping patterns continue to evolve, OMS now offers mid-market retailers the capabilities and visibility they need to craft the best possible customer experience.
