Getting Ahead of High Online Order Volumes with OMS
Do you find yourself drowning in a sea of online orders, struggling to keep your head above water? It's fantastic for business, but how on earth do you keep track of it all without losing your sanity?
You're not alone. For businesses navigating the vast world of eCommerce, the challenge of handling a skyrocketing order volume is all too real.
The answer lies in embracing the power of the right technology – OMS software. This remarkable business tool transforms chaos into order, ensuring your customers receive their purchases swiftly and leaving them with a smile.
In this blog post, we'll guide you through the nitty-gritty of using OMS technology and staying on top of all your eCommerce orders—especially during those peak shopping times that might leave other online retailers completely overwhelmed.
Order Management is not just about getting products out the door—it's about transforming your eCommerce business into a well-oiled machine, effortlessly managing orders, and keeping customers happy.
e-commerce">The Power of Order Management Systems in E-commerce
In the fast-paced world of online retail, staying ahead of the game is crucial. Enter the Order Management System (OMS) – a powerful ally for businesses in the digital marketplace. Whether you're an online retailer, wholesaler, 3PL, or warehouse, an OMS will help you orchestrate seamless order fulfilment processes, ensuring you meet the ever-growing demands of multi-channel selling.
Think of an OMS as the capable assistant you've always yearned for, taking charge of everything from synchronising inventory to managing dropship capabilities and handling returns.
Its mission? To automate those time-consuming tasks that could otherwise tie you down, freeing up your valuable time to focus on other critical aspects of your business.
With an OMS at the helm, you can rest assured that orders are not only fulfilled accurately but also that your online stores remain consistently updated, mitigating the risk of stockouts.
What sets OMS apart is its ability to streamline operations by offering pre-built API integrations. These integrations serve as the bridge connecting you with other essential components of your e-commerce business – think couriers, accounting systems, shopping carts, and warehousing systems.
The real perk here is gaining control over every step of the fulfilment process, all from a central platform.
In essence, an Order Management System isn't just a technological tool—it's your strategic partner in navigating the complexities of online retail.
ecommerce">The Challenge of Scaling Order Volumes in eCommerce
As your online business scales to new heights, the challenges it faces evolve, demanding a sophisticated approach to order management.
In essence, scaling successfully demands more than just an increase in sales. It requires a strategic investment in a robust OMS that can adapt to the evolving landscape of your business—especially if you want to sell to a broader customer base across diverse geographic regions.
Let's delve into the common e-commerce order management challenges that scaling brands often encounter:
1. Decreasing Delivery Times
As your customer base expands, so do expectations for swift deliveries. Meeting this demand requires a nimble OMS that can optimise your fulfilment process, ensuring that orders reach your customers with efficiency and speed.
2. Keeping Delivery Costs Down
Scaling doesn't mean cost escalation. A robust OMS helps in controlling and managing delivery costs, allowing you to strike the right balance between speedy deliveries and cost-effectiveness, thereby maintaining your bottom line.
3. Managing Orders and Inventory Across Several Channels
With growth comes diversification, often leading to the expansion across multiple sales channels. An advanced OMS acts as the central command centre, seamlessly coordinating orders and inventory across various channels, preventing the chaos that can accompany such expansion.
4. Facilitating Complex Fulfilment Requests
Scaling businesses often encounter intricate fulfilment requests. Your OMS should be equipped to handle these complexities effortlessly, ensuring that even the most intricate orders are fulfilled accurately and on time.
5. Facilitating Returns
Returns are an integral part of e-commerce, and as you grow, so does the volume of returns. A sophisticated OMS simplifies the returns process, providing a seamless experience for both you and your customers.
Benefits of an E-Commerce Order Management System
Choosing the right tools for your business might feel like navigating an uphill path, but when it comes to Order Management Systems (OMS), getting it right opens the door to a multitude of benefits.
Benefit 1: Manual Processes Can Be Automated
It's surprising how many companies still rely on manual processes involving data entry, spreadsheets, and a disparate array of online and offline tools to manage orders. The key to unlocking efficiency lies in embracing a modern Order Management System (OMS), a move that not only saves time and money but also enhances overall operational effectiveness.
Here are some of the manual processes that can be automated with the help of OMS technology:
• Order Routing: Say goodbye to the days of manually directing orders. With a contemporary OMS, order routing becomes a breeze. The system efficiently directs orders to the right destinations, ensuring a seamless flow from purchase to fulfilment.
• Order Receiving at the Warehouse/Fulfilment Centre: Manual order receiving can be a time-consuming endeavour. An OMS automates this process, expediting the intake of orders at the warehouse or fulfilment centre, leading to quicker processing times.
• Cross-Channel Data Syncing: Managing orders across multiple channels can be a logistical nightmare without automation. An OMS synchronises data across various channels, maintaining consistency and coherence in your order management strategy.
• Label Printing: No more wrestling with manual label creation. An OMS automates label printing, ensuring accuracy and efficiency in marking packages for shipment.
• Tracking Shipments: Keep your customers informed effortlessly. With automated shipment tracking, an OMS provides real-time updates, enhancing the overall customer experience by eliminating the need for manual tracking.
• Returns and Refunds: The often intricate process of handling returns and refunds becomes a smooth operation with an OMS. Automation ensures accuracy, reducing the risk of errors associated with manual data entry.
Benefit 2: Better Customer Service
A robust Order Management System (OMS) not only expedites delivery times but also provides customers with unprecedented visibility into the fulfilment process.
1. Faster Delivery Times
Speed is of the essence, and a reliable OMS ensures swifter delivery times. By optimising the fulfilment process, orders reach customers promptly, contributing to an enhanced overall shopping experience.
2. Increased Visibility
Picture this: your customers gain real-time insights into the status of their orders. An advanced OMS goes beyond the basics, providing visibility into stock locations relevant to the customer's geography. This transparency empowers customers with a greater understanding of their order's journey.
3. Customised Fulfilment Options
The magic lies in offering choices. An automated OMS goes a step further by suggesting fulfilment options based on the customer's location and stock availability. This allows customers to tailor their delivery preferences, deciding when and how they want their orders delivered, whether prioritising speed or convenience and willing to pay a premium for it.
4. Enhanced Customer Decision-Making
Empowering customers to make decisions aligns with modern consumer expectations. An OMS that provides choice not only caters to diverse preferences but also engenders a sense of control in the customer, fostering a positive shopping experience.
5. Soaring Customer Satisfaction
Ultimately, these enhancements culminate in elevated customer satisfaction. Meeting and exceeding customer expectations through efficient fulfilment options establishes your brand as customer-centric, laying the foundation for loyalty and positive word-of-mouth.
Benefit 3: Scaling Your Business is Relatively Simple
When it comes to the hustle and bustle of online shopping, the ability to scale swiftly is a hallmark of success. A fully functioning Order Management System (OMS) emerges as a catalyst for rapid business expansion, offering a range of benefits that pave the way for accelerated growth.
1. Enhanced Inventory Visibility
Scaling your business demands a clear view of your inventory landscape. An OMS provides an enhanced, real-time view of inventory levels, allowing you to make informed decisions about stock management. This transparency is crucial for preventing stockouts and ensuring seamless operations as you grow.
2. Increased Fulfilment Capacity
As order volumes surge, so does the need for expanded fulfilment capabilities. A robust OMS increases your fulfilment capacity, efficiently handling a higher volume of orders and ensuring that your business can keep pace with growing demand without compromising on efficiency.
3. Automation of Frequent Processes
Time is a precious commodity in the world of business scaling. A fully functional OMS automates repetitive and time-consuming processes, freeing up valuable resources for strategic decision-making and growth-focused initiatives. From order processing to inventory management, automation ensures efficiency at every step.
4. Effortless Adaptability
The scalability of an OMS is not just about handling more orders; it's about adapting to the changing needs of your business. The system is designed to evolve with you, offering the flexibility to accommodate new channels, markets, and operational intricacies seamlessly.
5. Accelerated Business Growth
When inventory visibility is enhanced, fulfilment capacities are increased, and processes are automated, the result is a business that can scale with unprecedented speed. The holistic benefits of an OMS create an environment conducive to sustained and accelerated growth.
How an OMS Helps You Win Over 10pm Shoppers
E-commerce means that your shop is always open and ready for business. Winning over customers transcends traditional business hours.
Research shows that 10 pm is one of the most important shopping times for online retailers. Which means that when many shoppers are placing orders, you might not be at your computer.
This is where the first benefit of implementing an Order Management System (OMS) becomes a game-changer.
When a customer clicks 'Buy now,' an Order Management System (OMS) springs into action, automating the entire sales process in real-time. It selects the best shipping provider, generates dispatch emails, and ensures orders move swiftly through the pipeline—even when you're not actively managing it.
At 10 pm, when online shopping peaks, an OMS captures this surge. It allows your business to efficiently handle orders, catering to customers who prefer to shop during off-hours.
Then the OMS will automatically choose the most cost-effective shipping provider. This not only enhances the customer experience but also contributes to overall satisfaction. At the same time, the system will automatically keep customers in the loop with automated shipping dispatch emails.
This all translates into more efficient order processing and a better shopping experience for your customers as a whole.
How an OMS Elevates Accuracy and Efficiency
When it comes to running an online business, precision and efficiency are paramount.
Manually updating stock on various marketplace platforms is not only time-consuming but also stress-inducing. The risk of overselling or inventory discrepancies is high.
An OMS eliminates this stress by automating stock management, ensuring accuracy and reducing vulnerability to human error.
By providing a unified view of all channels, the system acts as the automated link between them. This ensures that inventory updates are swift, reducing the lag time between sales and updates across platforms. The result? A real-time reflection of your stock levels.
Overselling can be a nightmare for any e-commerce business. The seamless integration facilitated by an OMS mitigates the risks associated with overselling. The automated link ensures that as soon as a product is sold on one platform, inventory levels are instantly updated across all channels, preventing potential mishaps.
Furthermore, the OMS provides a consolidated, joined-up view of all sales channels. This means that you will always have the stock available to sell that you promise on your website or app. This builds trust and fosters positive relationships with your customer base.
Manage All Your Marketplaces in One Location
Managing multiple marketplaces and diverse courier services can be a daunting task for retailers.
In fact, handling numerous marketplaces and courier services can overwhelm even the most organised retailers. An OMS solves this by providing a centralised dashboard that offers a unified view of all marketplaces and courier channels. This dashboard acts as your control centre, streamlining management across platforms and logistics providers.
The risk of overlooking crucial details is significantly reduced when all your marketplaces are visible at a glance. An OMS ensures that you never miss a beat by consolidating information from various platforms into one coherent display. This means no more worrying about misplaced orders or losing track of customer preferences.
A unified dashboard isn't just convenient—it's essential for maintaining complete oversight of your business. An OMS not only presents data in a consolidated manner but also facilitates data analysis.
This enables you to derive meaningful insights, empowering you to make strategic decisions that align with the unique demands of your marketplaces.
Strategic Insights to Identify Bestsellers
Implementing an Order Management System (OMS) unlocks a powerful capability: the ability to swiftly identify and leverage best selling products.
The brilliance of an OMS lies in its capacity to automate the organisation of crucial statistics and insights. From product popularity to marketplace trends, the system compiles and presents data in a comprehensible format, eliminating the need for manual data mining and analysis.
Which means the OMS equips you with the knowledge to identify best selling products and high-performing marketplaces. This information is instrumental in making informed decisions about where to invest more stock or attention, maximising your business's potential.
As a consequence, the OMS enables you to identify unusual trends promptly, allowing you to pivot your strategy in response to changing market conditions.
This makes it possible to take a proactive stance in your decision-making.
24/7 Order Processing with an OMS
An Order Management System (OMS) gives you the ability to automatically process orders around the clock, every day of the year.
This means that orders received after you step away from your computer are still seamlessly initiated, from updating inventory to payment processing and label creation.
The ability to automatically process orders extends beyond mere convenience. It translates into efficient order fulfilment, with the OMS orchestrating critical steps in the process. For those working with fulfilment houses, the OMS automates the transmission of information, reducing delays and enhancing the overall speed of order processing.
Furthermore, the automated nature of order processing with an OMS reduces dependency on manual intervention. This not only minimises the risk of errors but also liberates you from the need to be physically present at your computer for order initiation. The result is a smoother, more streamlined order fulfilment process.
Conclusion
If you're struggling with the complexities of managing orders across multiple online platforms, you're not alone. Many online sellers face challenges like updating stock levels, generating labels, and navigating courier options, which can slow down order fulfilment and impact sales.
The challenges faced by online businesses are anything but simple. The sheer complexity of managing various aspects, from order processing to inventory control, can be overwhelming for even the most adept entrepreneurs.
Enter the Order Management System (OMS), a game-changer in the world of ecommerce. By leveraging the capabilities of OMS, your ecommerce venture not only survives but thrives amidst high order volumes. This, in turn, translates into growth, market dominance, and heightened profitability.