August 14, 2020 
A new business with limited orders is easy to handle. But when order increases, you find it difficult to handle manually.
As manual entries are not only tedious but also opens a door to numerous errors that can affect your business. This is why the Order Management System is required.
What is an Order Management System (OMS)?
Order Management System or OMS is any software tool or platform that helps track sales and orders manage inventory and monitor order fulfillment.
OMS also allows the people, processes and partnerships necessary for products to find out their ways to the customers who have bought them.
A good order management system streamlines data in one system, manage inventory and supply, and handles return anytime and anywhere.
This shows how important it is to integrate your eCommerce store with the order management system. WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, Prestashop, are some of the eCommerce platforms that provide the right tools to manage orders.
Benefits of choosing the effective Order Management System
- It provides a fast, precise, and smooth experience throughout.
- It serves a complete supply chain to your business.
- It gives a detailed view of your inventory and physical store.
- Reduces time and money.
- Avoid inventory recounts and over-ordering.
- Responds quickly to customer demands and marketplace variations.
- Provides order details, or manage, return, and exchange options to customers.
- Increases efficiency by using barcode scanners and is an automated process, hence reducing error chances.
Order Management System is profitable for the Omnichannel business strategy as it provides information regarding orders and inventory across all channels in real-time.
For instance, if a customer researches a product online and purchases from the store or vice versa, in both cases the retailer will require an OMS with multichannel inventory insights and order fulfillment to track this order.
Key Features of an effective Order Management System to consider
Order Management System is important for retailers as well as customers. Consider these key features when choosing your OMS.
1. RMA Request
Every business has to deal with the customer’s return or cancellations of orders. So, to tackle this you need an RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization) system to manage all your returns, exchange & cancellation of orders while running an eCommerce store.
RMA streamlines the return, cancel & exchange procedures for the customers by providing an interface to let them communicate with the sellers.
It also provides a list of acceptable reasons from which customers can choose the valid reason for the return, exchange, or cancellation. Based on that, the retailers can verify if the reason is valid or not and can accept or reject the RMA requested by the customers.
2. Option to Reorder
The reorder option is an important feature for your customer as it lets the customers to easily check their order history and reorder products in less time.
Some essential items like everyday care, baby products, toiletries, etc are purchased often so you can’t get your customers to browse back your whole website again and again for the same items to purchase. Hence, OMS let them reorder their previous purchase effortlessly.
3. Option to Update Shipping Address
There are instances when customers relocate to a different address or has registered the wrong shipping address and placed the order. Therefore, in such cases, OMS gives an option to the customers to update their shipping addresses.
4. Generate Invoice
Invoice is the product order bill published by the seller to the buyer providing the purchase details requesting the buyer to make the payment for the order purchased.
It is a necessary document as it is a reference for his purchase and can be useful in the future if required. So, providing the “Invoice Request” option for the customer is an essential feature.
5. Order Lookup
This allows customers to enter their email address and order number, to track their order. Shopify storefront is an easy-to-use customer-facing portal where without creating an account, customers can purchase and track their orders.
The Order Lookup feature reduces a significant amount of your customer support requests, which saves your time and money, which simultaneously offers a seamless customer experience.
6. Product and Inventory Management
Inventory management is the most important part of your business. An effective order management system helps you organize all your product data in a single place and let you enter the cost data and order price.
Your OMS keep a track of stock numbers for every product so that you know how much inventory you can sell.
7. OMS Product and Inventory Management
Inventory management is the most important part of your business. An effective order management system helps you organize all your product data in a single place and let you enter the cost data and order price.
Your OMS keeps a track of stock numbers for every product so that you know how much inventory you can sell.
OMS also keep a track of customer interaction with the portal, provides multiple payment gateways and easy integration with apps or tools.
Summing-Up
You must select the right Order Management System that integrates with your business and fulfill the requirements.
As the customer’s expectations are getting higher with the time it is important to ensure that you are delivering a flawless customer experience with a cost-effective order management tool.
For more insights on Order Management System (OMS), stay tuned to our blog updates.
