Scalability and Stability
An OMS needs to scale to meet customer demands during predicted peaks (e.g., BFCM) and unpredictable prolonged peaks (e.g., online purchasing during the pandemic). That means a scalable and stable system running on a cloud-native SaaS platform is essential for retail order management solutions. You don’t want your OMS to crash when you need it most so always ask for proof of scalability through order volume data and capacity stress test results.
Advanced Inventory Visibility
In an omnichannel world, retailers need to be able to make every usable unit of inventory available to customers. That means leveraging inventory that could be scattered and siloed across multiple warehouses, DCs, stores, 3PLs, drop shippers, etc. Make sure your OMS is able to unify disparate inventory pools across multiple channels to provide a single enterprise view of stock in real time.
Make sure your OMS is able to unify disparate inventory pools across multiple channels.
Distributed Order Management
Distributed order management (DOM) functionality is what enables omnichannel commerce to provide seamless shopping experiences to customers while also helping retailers manage fulfillment costs. Working together with inventory visibility, distributed order management orchestrates the order fulfillment process, routing orders to the most cost-effective fulfillment locations using configurable business rules. Ensure your OMS also has order consolidation functionality to enable items fulfilled from different locations be combined, reducing multiple shipments per order to save on delivery costs.
Ensure your OMS also has order consolidation functionality to enable items fulfilled from different locations be combined.
Store Fulfillment
Click and collect orders have grown in popularity and are now must-haves for any retailer competing in the omnichannel space. The ability for in-store associates to easily coordinate, assemble or fulfill orders routed to a store is key in providing a seamless delivery experience for retail customers. Ensure your OMS is intuitive enough for staff to be able to adopt it quickly and flexible enough to account for orders arriving from multiple channels.
Customer Management
Customers expect flexibility — even after they’ve placed the order — and retailers need to respond accordingly. Your customer service team needs the ability to respond to customer requests and modify orders when needed (e.g., add or remove products, splitting shipments, address changes, credits, price adjustments, returns, etc.) and also track customer order history to ensure a positive customer experience.