Organize Your Chaos with Order Management System

Every great system’s predecessor is chaos! It is the mix of trial, error, and effort that makes it one of a kind. Just the way a customized order management software is for any medium or large-scale business. In times when customer experience is expected to be at peak, it becomes challenging for any business to manage their orders and ensure timely delivery.

Traditional order management solutions were good but are surely a thing of the past. Product orders were typically received via phone call, fax, or direct mail before the emergence of modern order management software. Following the receipt of the sales order, the order management process required the manual task of verifying inventory levels, calling a warehouse to ensure that the items were in stock, writing out packing slips, removing the item from inventory, and delivering it to the post office. It isn’t just about receiving an order, packing it, and delivering it to your customer.

If you are a business owner, it is obvious that you think of elevating your customer experience to the levels where they can begin trusting you for their future purchases as well. Modern-day order management is more than just picking, packing, and shipping! It includes focusing on the overall order straight from receiving it to packing it properly and delivering it on time to ensure a satisfactory experience for your customers.

Imagine the back-end process now! The chaos of checking the inventory, finding the right variation, updating the inventory, forecasting the demand of the same product in the future, and a heap of other such ancillary tasks that it may take to manage – all the while ensuring your customer receives their product on time and is happy with the service too!

This is when the modern-day order management software comes into play. Any business that aims to excel their sales on e-commerce platforms needs to understand the logic and true meaning behind order management solutions.

What is an Order Management System Software?

Order management software tracks and fulfills orders in real-time, changes inventory levels, and automates data and analytics. The best system integrates all the crucial operational processes, allowing you to control fulfillment from a single location. In addition to this, it also interfaces with your e-commerce platform and inventory management system. This way, you can get an accurate account of a product’s availability, incoming orders, and other aspects of your business, such as:

• Picking, packing, processing, and shipping of orders
• Inventory visibility, including location and quantity
• Product information
• Vendor information
• Returns and refunds
• Channels of Distribution
• Customer information
• Order status

Have you faced these obstacles in your e-commerce business?

• Unnecessary delay in order fulfillment
• Inability to manage multiple sales channels
• Challenges in managing multiple warehouses
• Difficulty in understanding the velocity and volume of orders
• Forecast which products are likely to be sold based on current inventory status
• Inability to offer a smooth customer experience
• Inability to seamlessly manage the vendor relationships and communication

If you can relate to any of the conditions, you likely need to look for a reliable order management system software that fits your business needs and simultaneously elevates your overall multi-channel order management experience.

Why Do You Need Order Management Software?

Order management software updates inventory in your integrated channels when a customer places their order, so you never have to worry about a shipment being cancelled (or placing items on backorder). This is why order management issues can quickly load your inventory with inaccuracies. And these errors frequently result in dissatisfied customers, especially when you don’t have the merchandise to satisfy an order. On the other side, if you have an excess of a particular product, your storage costs may rise as a result of stagnating SKUs.

As a result, controlling your inventory requires a delicate balance, which order management software may help with. Furthermore, it assists in maintaining your brand experience both before and after a purchase is made by merging directly with your sales channels, shipping providers, vendors, and warehouses.

Because they automate previously manual procedures and free up adequate time for you to focus on growth, these systems act as the nerve center of your organization. This advanced proficiency ensures your inventory counts are always correct, allowing for quicker order processing, regardless of volume, seasonality, or other factors.

What Does Order Management Software Offer?

When you have thousands of orders to take care of, a manual approach can be a bad idea. The best order management software is adept in overcoming multiple issues and simplifies processes such as:

Distributed Order Management

Businesses that deal with multiple orders from several channels need to distribute them for an easier understanding. Not to forget, when hundreds and thousands of customers place orders at the same time, it is advisable to have an efficient order management system software that can help you with order state and event management. It also offers you information on order orchestration, routing, partial shipment and helps manage order splitting to save your time and costs.

Omnichannel Fulfillment

Whether you have an online or an offline business, you need robust strategies to handle the orders and the entire process behind them. If you do it individually, you are bound to lose track of time and hamper your brand image due to multiple errors. Getting customized order management software can ease out the hassle of managing multiple channels. Moreover, it offers features such as ship-from-store, ship-to-store, BOPIS (Buy online, pick up in store), and endless aisle of inventory.

Global Inventory Management

When there are huge distances between the warehouses and your inventory, it is advisable to scatter them strategically across crucial geographical locations. With order management software, it becomes easy to track inventory everywhere, learn details about in-transit inventory and get access to key features such as intelligent sourcing and allocation. The latter helps you save time in determining which product needs to be updated, thereby eliminating all your grunt work.

Post Tracking Numbers

Of course, you would want your customers to learn every single detail about their order to establish an honest, transparent connection with them. A customized order management software gives them real-time information and helps you resolve complex communication issues with your end customers. It can assist you in auto-retrieving tracking code, uploading tracking information, and allows multiple tracking codes support.

Central Dashboard

Getting real-time updates via a central dashboard in customized order management software helps to manage multiple marketplaces and single order windows. You can get a centralized view of various key aspects that can uplift your e-commerce business. A central dashboard brings clarity about your sales activity by determining the number of packages that need to be shipped, invoiced and delivered. Moreover, you can also take a quick look at the number of items sold and find out which are the active products that are selling more in numbers. A detailed summary helps any retail business owner in creating future strategies that can save them from extra costs.

Customer Service

As per Kinsta, 64% of customers find customer experience more important than price. This speaks a lot about how much they value the way you handle their queries with patience and resolve issues quickly. Also, as predicted by the Guardian, by 2020, the quality of customer experience provided by a brand will be more important than price and product as a key differentiator. This means that in the upcoming years, brands will level up their customer service strategies and work on their customer’s overall user experience as well. The same statistic suggests that U.S. companies lose an average of $62 billion annually due to poor customer service! If this doesn’t bother you, we don’t know what will!

A customized order management system software can help you answer your customer’s questions about order details, status lookup, appeasements, refunds, credit edits, and order escalation workflows. Look for the best order management software that can offer you customized information as per your business requirements.

Does My e-commerce Business Need an Order Management System?

Order management is essential for any e-commerce business that wants to grow and provide excellent customer service. While some businesses may be able to succeed without order management software, there will come a time when it will be necessary to achieve even greater success. Before you dive deep, understand if your business is facing the following scenarios that make it crucial to invest in order management software.

Boosting Multichannel Distribution

Having your products listed on multiple sales channels puts them in front of potential customers. However, the more channels you sell on, the more likely you are to oversell, as you may be managing orders and inventory updates from two, three, four, or even more online and offline locations. This can be quite cumbersome if you do it manually. Multichannel order management system software, thankfully, is known to alleviate many of these issues.

Managing Multiple Warehouse Locations

Having multiple warehouses gives you a geographic advantage across the country (or around the world), but it also complicates your product distribution. This is where order management software becomes essential. The ability of a distributed order management system to integrate across company infrastructure, service providers, and supply chain technology is a critical feature.

Most order management systems connect to your accounting system, inventory manager, warehouses, and customer service departments, among other things. Some even have an App Store or, at the very least, open APIs that can be used to build third-party connections if they don’t have one. Order management will be as seamless and automated as possible thanks to integrations with your existing systems.

Related Article: Multiple Warehouse Management Challenges and Their Solutions

Shipping to Worldwide Customers

Shipping can be difficult, especially if your company ships internationally. Calculating the best shipping rates necessitates a great deal of thought and consideration, which can be difficult when trying to fulfill customer orders as quickly as possible. You cannot just afford to spend hours finding the right shipping dealers when you have a pool of product orders to work upon! Order management software can help you overcome these barriers by simply stating the required intellect.

Ever-increasing Staff Costs

As your business grows, expanding your team is a quick fix, but it can make things a little tricky as you scale. With that in mind, make sure you’re not simply adding more people to a problem that automation (via an order management system) can solve more effectively. Often, businesses hire staff for mundane tasks such as accounting or updating inventory, etc. Not only will eliminating data entry save you and your team time, but it will also reduce human error. When you use software to create orders in QuickBooks automatically, you eliminate several steps from the process and ensure that the data is correct. Look for portals that provide up-to-date QuickBooks information to your reps and wholesale customers.

Unwanted Inventory & Fulfillment Errors

Most order management software will keep track of your inventory, ensuring that sales channels are updated quickly and accurately as products leave your warehouse. These updates must be seamless and real-time to prevent customers from being oversold.

How Can Order Management Software Help My eCommerce Business?

Order management software is created in such a manner that you don’t have to worry about any single, minute detail about your business. You can simply check the dashboard and get real-time updates about every single order and forecast your inventory management based on the same information. Don’t be surprised if we tell you that the forecasting part is also taken care of by order management software!

Retail businesses will boom especially in terms of e-commerce considering a new era has emerged after Covid-19 took over the world. More and more people will vouch for e-shopping instead of physically visiting the shopping centers for their requirements. This automatically means you need to amp up your e-commerce strategy. Now that has a ton of facets like managing your product quality, production, inventory, sale, customer experience, and whatnot. However, order management software can sort the majority of your issues and benefit your business in multiple ways. Read further to learn how.

Augmented Revenue & Controlled Expenses

When it comes to keeping costs low and revenue high, automation is your friend, and an order management system gives you the automation capabilities you need to succeed. For starters, it can help with inventory control by automatically generating reports on your stock, indicating where you’re running low and what you should liquidate. It can forecast future inventory trends based on historical data, so you know what to budget for and when to have them in stock.

Another benefit of automation is that it eliminates manual operations whenever possible. Human error can cost you money and cause you to lose consumers. It also depletes profitability and diverts focus away from high-value, brand-building activities.

Employee Productivity on the Rise

Using an order management system software to replace manual processes has a good impact on your personnel as well. They won’t have to adapt slow manual processes to accommodate increased demand as your company expands. They can concentrate their efforts on the most important aspect of your business: your consumers.

The increased efficiency that comes with an order management system will also be appreciated by employees. The solution will empower staff to do a better job by providing real-time information and integrating that data across the supply chain.

Enhanced Customer Satisfaction

As per Kinsta, a moderate increase in customer service can yield an average of an $823 million increase over 3 years for a company with $1 billion in annual revenues. An order management system software is the right choice if you wish to focus on building a convenient customer experience.

Digging into the e-commerce statistics, the key to good customer service is making everything as easy as possible for people. It turns out that an inconvenient return policy deters 80% of shoppers, while 74% of people are likely to switch brands if they find the purchasing process too cumbersome. The most significant advantage of an order management system is its beneficial impact on client satisfaction. Order management systems are aimed at getting products to customers faster, reducing errors, and providing a more personalized experience. Your customers will also reap the benefits of an order management system once it is implemented in your system.

A Modernized Approach

An order management system is designed to efficiently fulfill orders across all of your e-commerce sales channels like Amazon, e-bay, Rakuten, Walmart, Jet, Sears, Etsy, etc. Your firm will struggle to stay up with the competition if it does not have contemporary, integrated, and dedicated order management software.

You don’t want your clients to identify your company with adjectives like “dated,” “slow,” or “old fashioned” when they think of you. They’ll notice the improved customer experience you can deliver with the proper order management solution, and your business will flourish as a result.

What to Look for in Your Order Management Software?

Order management software can resolve multiple issues relating to your orders, inventory, stock, shipment, and whatnot. However, it is feasible only when you take a comprehensive look at where your retail business requires assistance. If you don’t face certain issues, a fully-functioning order management software is going to be of no use. It is essential that you determine your business requirements first and then find customized order management solutions. The best order management software will:

• Convert orders and bids rapidly and accurately, reducing the time between order and shipment
• Keep track of stock levels visually so you can restock them quickly and avoid having to tell customers they’ll have to wait
• Keep a record of previous orders for historical reference, which is useful for customer returns, complaints, and encouraging repeat purchases
• Recognize trends that internal managers may use to improve the supply chain from beginning to finish by modifying prices, ordering more or less stock, and anticipating future recruiting needs
• Confirm shipping and processing timelines so that both the customer and the company have realistic expectations for getting products from the warehouse to the mailbox

Business owners and managers are often curious about the financial implications of new software systems. Consider the amount of time you, your office manager, and other employees spend on each order by the number of orders you process per week. You might likely be using that time on business development, marketing, or other duties that will help you build your company. Implementing order management software could be the key to propelling your business forward.

To conclude Order Management System to the rescue!

At eSellerhub, we focus on assisting our clients by offering them real-time order management software solutions. We focus on helping them by integrating their book-keeping software, providing inventory information, customer account customization, dropship and multiple store capabilities, easy portal updates, and a whole lot of user-friendliness. eSellerhub’s order management software supports the entire purchase-to-pay workflow.

Without your input, good order management software streamlines your order process, makes fulfillment easier, and updates your inventory without you having to do anything. Furthermore, for an all-encompassing strategy, the most popular platforms blur the distinctions between inventory and order management.

eSellerhub’s leading order and inventory management software integrates easily into an omnichannel environment, allowing you to optimize every stage of your supply chain. Ecommerce businesses can use eSellerhub to automate their most time-consuming operations, allowing them to grow faster and stay ahead of the competition. We automate essential processes such as customer and supplier invoices, credit checks, purchase order generation, and data transmission.

Get in touch with our experts to get customized order management solutions for your retail business. You can call us at +1 408 600 0534 or drop an email at contact@esellerhub.com for more information.