Running a successful ecommerce business requires efficient tools, and one of the most important tools is order management software. Order management software enables you to process orders more quickly, more effectively, and without errors. But, how do you choose the best order management software for your ecommerce operation? Let’s look at what order management software is and how it makes your ecommerce business run more cost-effectively.
What is Order Management Software (OMS)?
Order management software tracks inventory, sales, orders, and order fulfillment. It is the central hub that ties all the elements of an ecommerce business together — people, processes, and partnerships — to ensure products get to the consumers who bought them.
In today’s economy, an order management system for ecommerce facilitates a multi-dimensional operation that involves every part of your online business, including:
- Customers
- Sales channels
- Product information
- Inventory levels and location
- Supplier channels for purchasing and receiving
- Customer service: returns and refunds
- Orders: printing, picking, packing, processing, shipping
What Does an OMS Do?
An order management app is a key tool for ecommerce businesses. Let’s look at the features, capabilities, and tasks that an OMS facilitates for your ecommerce store.
Track Inventory Levels for Each Channel
Due to the capabilities of internet technology, brands can reach consumers via several channels. Consumers can buy items from a brick-and-mortar store through their point-of-sale (POS) software, from a brand’s direct-to-consumer ecommerce store, through social media channels, or combine online and offline purchases using a buy-online, pickup-in-store (BOPIS) order process.
The need to manage inventory across several channels is the third-largest challenge for supply-chain managers. This includes managing the volume, fulfillment, and speed of omnichannel orders which can turn into a bottleneck for your business if supply chains aren’t fully supported for scalable growth.
An OMS helps retailers to manage all of the inventory across multiple channels while keeping everything orderly and accurate. This online order management system is designed to help your ecommerce business improve your inventory management process going forward.
Small Business Order Management
What are the benefits for a small business to use an OMS?
The Benefits of a Good OMS
1. Improve Order Accuracy
Working to fulfill orders by hand without using an OMS can be risky. If you’re processing your orders manually or using spreadsheets, that leaves you open to human error. 62% of retailers find that human error is the root cause of their inventory and fulfillment issues.
This error can ruin customers’ experiences by, for instance, shipping a customer the wrong products, but it also creates logistical nightmares. This results in numerous returns, and costly efforts to correct these errors.
The same issues occur if you’re using manual data entry across platforms. In 2020, 28% of ecommerce brands were still spending time assembling and issuing purchase orders manually. If you use an OMS to automate purchase orders, you prevent the need for excessive communication between your brand and a vendor due to incorrect purchase orders.
2. Picking, Packing, and Shipping Faster
The cost of delivery is still important to online shoppers, but the speed at which a product moves from ordering to receiving the delivery is even more important. A retail survey in 2020 showed that 43% of consumers choose next-day delivery for online orders. This establishes high expectations for brands to meet to earn repeat business.
Your OMS streamlines picking and packing by checking stock across multiple warehouses. It identifies the fulfillment center that’s closest to the customer that has the needed inventory. Then, the order goes directly to that location for the products to be picked, packed and sent to the customer.
3. Meeting Customers’ Expectations
Shipping is a priority for customers. It starts with your efficiency in fulfilling the order, but it also includes transparency in shipping. It is estimated that 97% of consumers expect to be able to track their order — where it is and when it will be delivered. This expectation can be managed with your OMS. Built-in tracking allows customers to track their orders when they want to.
Transparency in shipping reduces negative reviews from unhappy customers. 75% of negative TrustPilot reviews are due to poor communication after purchase.
4. Forecast Inventory & Prevent Stockouts
Statistics show that 54% of retail businesses don’t have any access to forecasting software. Add to that another 18% are tying up too much cash in their inventory. Poor insight into inventory levels can result in major problems, costing up to 12% of sales yearly. These problems are:
- Overstocking: Having too much stock on-hand ties up your cash through the cost of the inventory and the cost of storage for that inventory.
- Stockouts: Losing sales due to inventory stockouts costs retailers $1 trillion yearly. This means turning consumers away and asking them to come back when the item is back in stock.
The best order management systems help ecommerce retailers with both issues.
5. Selling Globally
The global market is increasing rapidly, meaning that many brands sell globally.
The global ecommerce market is estimated at $4.5 trillion. Ecommerce makes it easy for brands to sell to customers across the globe. Filling international orders was difficult before having an OMS.
Small business order management software gives ecommerce businesses the ability to scale up their international customer base by:
- Managing payments for international orders in foreign currencies
- Automate orders to 3PL partners within each country
- Route orders to the warehouse local to the customer
Benefits of an Effective OMS
1. Automation
In today’s ecommerce market, businesses work hard to gain and keep customers. Consumers have a range of choices, and it’s so easy to change brand loyalties. That means you must focus all your efforts on acquiring and retaining customers.
This includes back-office operations that can increase the time it takes for a customer to receive their purchases. The right OMS will automate most of your simple operations, giving your human staff time to resolve complex issues.
Workflow automation is being adopted across industries. The best order management software incorporates AI for supply chains, logistics, and inventory automation. By automating the process from the customer order to the payment process, you can improve your direct customer services issues.
2. Reducing Human Error
It can’t be said enough times that human error is costly to businesses. Automating the process to receive and fulfill each order eliminates almost all human error, saving you money and time.
3. Real-Time Accurate Reporting
If you use several different software systems to process your orders, they aren’t in sync with each other to update reports. Another issue with multiple software systems is that they may not stay updated with the latest technology.
But, with an efficient OMS, you receive real-time data from orders, inventory, vendors, etc., so you can make informed decisions.
4. Superior Customer Experience
The best result from using an OMS is that your customers experience excellence, and want to continue buying from your ecommerce store.
Best Order Management Software for Small Business
If you have a small business and are looking for order management software, what features are a must?
- Comprehensive solution
- Multi-carrier shipping
- Inventory management
- Multi-channel operations
- Dropshipping
The best OMS that has all these solutions in one package is Ordoro.
Ordoro’s Customer Service Makes Transitioning a Breeze
When you start out with Ordoro, our customer service team will help you manage the transition. Ordoro’s support team is always there to help, real live people every time.
Ordoro provides:
- Free 30-Day Onboarding and Training to ensure you and your team feel comfortable and confident using the software.
- Lifetime Customer Support
- Ensuring You Have the Right People to Help with Your Transition
Lifetime Customer Support
Ordoro is there every step of the way when you transition to Ordoro.
Ordoro’s Implementation Team makes themselves available to customers with new transitions so they’re assured of support. Customers can easily reach out to Support when first going live with Ordoro. Any anxious moments, last-minute questions, or problems that pop up can be handled over the phone with Ordoro’s Implementation Team or Support Team.
New software can be overwhelming at first, and Ordoro wants to support you when you need help. Even if you don’t need the support, it’s nice to know that it is there regardless.
Ordoro’s Implementation Team makes themselves available to customers with new transitions so they’re assured of support. Customers can easily reach out to Support when first going live with Ordoro. Any anxious moments, last-minute questions, or problems that pop up can be handled over the phone with Ordoro’s Implementation Team or Support Team.
Ensuring You Have the Right People to Help with Your Transition
Get to know Ordoro. We’re a small software company based in Austin, Texas. We offer an all-in-one, web-based platform that helps ecommerce sellers manage their inventory and order fulfillment.
Our goal is to provide small-to-medium-sized businesses with the same back-office tools that large-scale corporations have — at an affordable price. For over a decade, thousands of online merchants have trusted us to help them manage and grow their businesses.
Here are the Features of the Best Order Management Software — Ordoro
Ordoro has all of the tools you’ll need to operate like a large-scale corporation but at a fraction of the cost.
1. Seamless Shipping
Pick, pack, and ship in bulk, and utilize barcode scanning for fast and accurate order fulfillment.
2. Consolidated Orders
Connect all your sales channels to easily manage a blended fulfillment model with automatic order and dropshipment routing.
3. Real Inventory Tracking
Unify your inventory across multiple warehouses, build complex kits, and writeback to all your sales channels with confidence.
4. Support Every Step of the Way
Ordoro’s Five-Star Support Team is ready to give you unlimited help from the start.
What Makes Ordoro Different from other Competitors
Ordoro knows what it takes to run a small business, because we’re also a small business. We know the trials and tribulations you go through because we are there with every step of the way.
Ordoro cares about each and every single customer. We want to see your business grow with Ordoro, and our team will encourage that growth every time you interact with us.
We are dedicated to connecting with you, our customers, and ensuring that Ordoro is the right fit for you. And we will support you and your business at every step so that you can grow.
Our dedication to you, our customers, is shown through our initial sales conversations, transition and implementation, and when you call for support.
We are proud of what we do!
Customer Reviews
Here’s what our customers are saying about Ordoro.
We couldn’t operate our family’s heirloom seed business without Ordoro – it’s that essential to us, especially when our business growth exploded overnight in the spring of 2020. Even when faced with a heavy order load, Ordoro allows us to manage and ship orders quickly and efficiently, and it’s easy for every member of our small team to use on a day-to-day basis.
Seeds for Generations
We have all of our orders in one place and once shipped Ordoro then updates those orders not just locally but also across our other platforms. The shipping rates are also extremely competitive and we are paying way less than we were with basic postal rates.
Zachary A.
Read more reviews on Capterra
Free Order Management Software
Do you want to try Ordoro’s order management software for FREE? If so, you have two options.
- Try our Express Plan with a 15-Day FREE trial to see what Ordoro can do to improve your order management and lower your operational costs.
- Try our NEW entirely FREE Starter Plan for online merchants to see how Ordoro makes order management easier and scalable to increase your revenues.
