A new E-commerce business pops up in your vicinity every day, making lives more comfortable, solving some needs, and creating some. With time, shoppers are getting more and more reasons (or products) to shop.
As e-commerce continues to reshape how businesses operate and customers shop, the BTS of logistics in the supply chain gets more complex and harder to manage. Your entire flow of products, from order placement to shipping and tracking, starts to get fractured with more load to cover as your business expands and offerings increase. And an e-commerce business with a lack of variety? It’s as good as dead.
How do you manage the supply chain logistics while satiating the need for increasingly changing shopping demands? That’s where e-commerce order management systems come into play.
This blog is all about exploring how powerful tools can streamline your workflows and improve customer experience, what the dos and don’ts are before getting an e-commerce order management solution for e-commerce businesses, and how to make the right decision.
What Are E-Commerce Order Management Systems?
E-commerce order management systems (OMS) are platforms or software solutions that allow retailers to track the flow of products from purchase transaction through order fulfillment processes and, finally, delivery to the customer. You can collect data for e-commerce orders across multiple channels. From order capture and inventory visibility to picking, packing, shipping, and returns, these systems manage the entire lifecycle of an order.
An e-commerce order management solution is usually employed to ensure consistency across all points of sale. How does OMS impact customer experience and business revenue? Let’s find out!
TYPICAL FLOW OF AN ORDER PROCESS
Why E-commerce Businesses Need Order Management Systems (OMS)
Loyalty as a concept has lost relevance in a market with tons of options, constantly innovating platforms and delivery methods, and trends changing in the blink. Businesses that cater to changing customer needs and demands thrive.
Order Management directly impacts the way a customer views and perceives your brand. The market size for multichannel order management around the globe is projected to grow at a CAGR of 11.6% by 2030 and to $4.2 billion by 2027. E-commerce order management solutions help keep your brand’s upstanding image spotless, ensuring every product stays the course and all holes are removed. OMS also adds a layer of automation and scalability across multiple channels for your e-commerce businesses.
Multichannel Complexity
It’s not news, but customers now shop across websites, apps, marketplaces, social platforms, and even brick-and-mortar stores. Without a centralized e-commerce order management solution, managing inventory, order routing, and fulfillment becomes chaotic.
Real-Time Inventory Visibility
Businesses lose $1 trillion in sales globally due to stockouts. An e-commerce order management solution helps track inventory movement in real time, reducing the chances of stockouts, overstocking, or overselling. It enables e-commerce businesses to sell what’s actually available, with zero over projections or false sold-outs. This helps your brand improve reliability.
Improved Shipping and Tracking
For an e-commerce business to succeed, it needs to work like a well-oiled machine, which involves having the right networks of vendors, shipping partners, delivery companies, and more. Top e-commerce order management systems integrate with vendors like shipping partners, enabling real-time updates, faster dispatches, and automated shipping label generation. Some may do it in-house, too, which is great for you to handle 100X work in 10X cost, and customers get the transparency to track their orders from the warehouse to the doorstep.
Streamlined Returns and Exchanges
Pre-purchasing workflows and in-purchase order tracking are followed by post-purchase handling. A well-designed e-commerce order management system order flow includes post-purchase handling, returns, exchanges, and refunds, without adding pressure on customer service or operations. 91% of Fortune 50 brands and 63% of D2C retailers are using solutions to handle returns processing. You need to jump on the bandwagon before it’s too late!
Automation of Repetitive Tasks
From shipping label creation to order status updates, these systems automate critical processes, reducing manual errors and freeing up resources for growth.
Key Features of E-commerce Order Management Systems
A good e-commerce order management solution should include certain essential features:
- Real-time Inventory Sync: Track across all warehouses and sales channels.
- Smart Order Routing: Change routing based on location, delivery SLA, and inventory availability.
- Automated Shipping Integration: Connect with major shipping carriers for faster processing.
- Centralized Order View: Manage all orders on the website, app, and marketplace from a unified dashboard.
- Order Lifecycle Tracking: View status updates from placement to fulfillment and delivery.
- Returns Management: Simplify and standardize return flows for all channels.
- Analytics & Reporting: Use real-time data to optimize operations.
- Scalability: Handle large order volumes and scale across geographies.
Benefits of Using an E-Commerce Order Management System
E-commerce order management solutions have an immense business impact. They can help you streamline your entire operations in a digital landscape, make supply and demand decisions, and optimize for business planning.
✅ Operational Efficiency at its Peak
You’re looking at end-to-end management here. By automating manual workflows, e-commerce order management systems improve order accuracy, reduce processing time, and eliminate redundancies.
✅ High Customer Satisfaction
A happy customer is one who knows your brand is always going to deliver. An OMS makes sure that happens every time. You get accurate order delivery, real-time tracking, fast shipping, and smooth returns to build trust and brand love, which are rare things to come by in the current markets.
✅ Low Costs, More Gains
With an e-commerce order management solution, you’re not just automating workflows, you’re also reducing costs and time and effort taken in order management. Optimized inventory levels and reduced labor costs help your e-commerce business improve bottom-line profitability.
✅ Better Planning & Predicting
An e-commerce order management solution with real-time tracking and data insights is the solution you need. With consolidated data and reporting, businesses can plan restocks, promotions, and product launches more efficiently.
✅ Future-Proofing the Business
Automated workflows work in tandem with the workforce that’s busy strategizing and planning for the markets. Scalable systems with omnichannel capabilities ensure your business is ready to meet any future trends and demands.
How Increff’s OMS Empowers E-commerce Businesses
Increff OMS (Order Management System) is a high-performance, cloud-based e-commerce order management solution enabling brands and retailers to optimize order processing, inventory visibility, and multichannel fulfillment across the e-commerce ecosystem. It’s designed to meet the high demands of fast-moving retail and fast-changing priorities. With Increff’s OMS, you get:
Multichannel Handling & Fulfillment
When you have that many channels to operate from, you need a centralized order management system. Whether you’re processing e-commerce orders from your website, Amazon, Flipkart, or a mobile app, Increff centralizes order management on a unified platform. You can top it up with automated order allocation based on warehouse location, stock availability, and delivery SLAs. You can also reduce order splits and fulfillment delays with smart allocation logic.
Real-Time Sync & 100% Visibility
You can sync inventory across multiple sales channels and warehouses every 15 minutes. You get accurate warehouse inventory tracking, real-time safety stock limits, and automatic blocking of low-stock SKUs. This means that your system ensures that you’re never in danger of overpromising (overselling) and stockouts. Customers get a super transparent experience.
Faster Fulfillment
Increff comes with pre-integrated 20+ logistics partners like Shiprocket, Delhivery, Bluedart, and more. You’re not only handling cross-channel order routing across B2B, B2C, and omnichannel deliveries, but also cutting down on costs and fulfillment time with automated label generation, shipping, and tracking. Increff’s InSC feature is a great addition to your stack. Read more about it here.
End-to-End Returns Management
You can classify returns into intelligent categories like resellable and non-resellable. Increff’s system also helps you keep proof validations for returns and automates credit/refund initiation with marketplace sync. You also get clear visibility into return reasons and actionable analytics. Ergo? Minimal revenue leakage!
Granular Insights
Order management also involves monitoring SLA performance, dispatch times, and order cancellations. With Increff, you get real-time visual dashboards to do that, along with detailed reports on inventory age, velocity, and stock cover to improve inventory health.
Plug-and-Play Integrations
Out-of-the-box integrations with ERPs, WMS platforms, ecommerce platforms, and marketplaces like Shopify, Amazon, Flipkart, WooCommerce, Nykaa, and many more make Increff OMS extremely easy to deploy and scale. You don’t need a lot of engineering dependency either.
🔗 Learn more about Increff’s OMS
How Increff Helped Pintola Drive Order Fulfillment with OMS
Pintola, one of India’s leading FMCG brands, faced growing problems with multichannel order volumes constantly rising. They needed a solution for accurate order fulfillment and real-time inventory visibility.
By implementing Increff’s e-commerce order management system, Pintola achieved:
~99.8% dispatch accuracy
~99.9% order fulfillment rate
79% decrease in order processing time
50% reduction in returns/cancellations
30% increase in warehouse space utilization and more
The result? A significant reduction in manual errors, better customer satisfaction, and a scalable backend to support their rapid e-commerce growth.
🔗 Read the full case study
Conclusion
Managing operations without an e-commerce order management system isn’t a great idea in the current climate. You can lose sales, have broken workflows constantly piling up, and, to top all that, have a laundry list of frustrated customers.
While you’re investing in scalable e-commerce order management systems, look for these differentiators to make it an absolute game-changer:
- Tailored fulfillment options to your business needs
- How quickly you need to implement OMS (and software companies that can offer that speed)
- If the OMS has multi-node fulfillment capability
- The shipping and tracking infrastructure of the OMS
- Would the OMS easily integrate with your existing tech stack? If not, does it provide all necessary integrations on its own?
- Table stakes like pricing, customer support, and the onboarding process
- Reviews and case studies on reputable platforms by peers
Choosing the right system is going to be crucial for you, not just to fulfill orders but to build a competitive advantage in an already tough market.
Curious to know if Increff meets your OMS needs? Talk to our expert and get tailored recommendations.
