In eCommerce, an order’s journey begins the moment a customer clicks the ‘Buy’ button. After that, you have to select the right product, package it, and then ship it to the right destination. That doesn’t seem like a lot if your business is new and small.
As your business grows, however, you will likely encounter potential obstacles, and that’s where order management comes in.
So, What’s Order Management?
In simple terms, order management is a retail process that involves receiving, processing, tracking, and fulfilling customers’ orders. The main aim of order management is to guarantee accurate and complete fulfillment of orders while being quick and cost-effective.
As your business grows, it becomes necessary to automate and streamline the order management process to avoid getting overwhelmed by the sea of orders coming in. Having a singapore holding can further enhance your capabilities by providing resources to implement sophisticated systems like an Order Management System (OMS), enabling efficient handling of orders and ensuring smoother operations as your business expands.
As one of the best suppliers for such systems, Deck Commerce has a great post answering the question ‘What is an order management system?‘, and other important things you need to know about order management systems.
Why Is Order Management Important?
Online shopping, unlike physical shopping, is more convenient and practical where geographical restrictions are a thing. What this means is that shoppers, regardless of their location, expect a seamless omnichannel experience complemented by fast, cost-effective shipping.
Order management is, therefore, important for retailers who want to establish a lovely shopping experience such as shipping from locations closest to a customer to reduce the cost and time taken to deliver.
In the same way, order management makes it possible for retailers to conveniently access their inventories from any fulfillment network for greater accuracy during order processing. Here’s a quick summary of the top reasons for implementing order management:
- Preventing under-stocking or overstocking
- Reducing errors made during order fulfillment
- Saving time in the order journey, allowing for speedier deliveries
- Providing visibility of stock availability to your customers, whether online or in-store
- Making it possible for customers to collect online orders at a store close to them, rather than having the order delivered to their home
- Enabling customers to return orders to the closest store instead of shipping them back to the retailer
- Reducing delivery costs
- Accessing reliable analytics and information that will help you make the right decisions
Phases of the Order Management Process
The following phases complete the order management process:
1. Order Placement
A customer navigates to an eCommerce marketplace, searches, and picks a product. The site calls an inventory API whose purpose is to provide product availability information that is displayed to the customer on the website.
The information is typically whether an item is in stock or not, and sometimes, how many items are remaining. If an item is in stock, the customer can add it to an online shopping cart. They can do so for one or more products available on the site.
2. Order Processing
The second phase is order processing, and here, the retailer’s OMS will take over and perform pre-fulfillment tasks that revolve around order capture and confirmation. It’s at this phase where tasks like payment authorization, fraud detection, credit card security verification, and address validation are completed.
This phase is the phase that opens the way to the fulfillment phase.
3. Inventory Updating
Once an order has been processed successfully, there should be an update in the inventory so that any customer who wants to purchase the product after that has up-to-date information about the item’s availability. This phase is also handled by the Order Management System (OMS).
4. Order Fulfillment
This phase is all about picking the ordered item off the shelf where it’s stored, verifying that it’s in line with the customer’s preferences, packing it, and then shipping it or getting it ready for collection by the customer. When an item has been fulfilled successfully, that means it has reached the customer who ordered it.
To Sum It All Up,
Order management is a crucial retail process that streamlines the customer’s order journey. For this process to be successful, you need a reliable Order Management System (OMS) like Deck Commerce.
Check out Deck Commerce’s website to learn more about order management and how you can pick the right OMS for your business.