Overview
Nowadays, online business is more and more popular and accessible. Many e-stores have increased their sales by expanding their business through selling on new channels and opening new stores. However, the biggest challenge they have to face is how to manage the growing number of orders from multiple sales channels. Fortunately, an order management system was born that solved these problems by automating manual tasks.
What is Order Management System?
An order management system is a software system that allows businesses to coordinate the entire transaction process. This process includes order entry, inventory management, fulfillment, and after-sales service. The software provides near-real-time insights into inventory, and customers can know when their orders will arrive.
Besides, the order management system allows businesses to manage inventory more accurately, track sales through sales platforms, automatically enter new inventory into the system, and alert you when your stock drops to re-order. Moreover, businesses can convert orders to cash using this system.
Why is an Order Management System so important? Almost every system and process in supply chain and order management is interrelated. Managing orders in an organization causes you to lose visibility and control over orders because they involve many partners. And the manual process to complete and shipping orders without errors is costly. So, order management systems help control costs and generate revenue by automating manual processes and reducing errors.
In addition, order management has a significant impact on customer service and brand reputation. Customers can ask questions and complete orders through the call center when purchasing online. Customers will have updated information by email when the order is completed. If there are any problems, they can return the product through a physical channel such as a store. With these conveniences, customers get a great shopping experience. As a result, retention and revenue increase.
Today, in the field of online sales, B2B e-commerce trends are growing and competing fiercely. To retain customers, B2B e-commerce companies use inventory management systems as well as order management systems in automating sales operations. That will increase customer loyalty when the service that B2B businesses provide makes them satisfied.
How does Order Management System Works?
An order management system will work by consolidating orders from all sales channels into one place. Therefore, a business that sells on Shopify, BigCommerce, Wix, Squarespace, Amazon, eBay, and a physical store can all see, manage, and fulfill their orders from just one login screen.
This system makes it easier to manage the ordering process. Businesses can handle everything from start to finish in one place instead of having to log into each sales channel or POS system. The order management system functions on the following key aspects:
- Orders: Deliver sales from every channel on one platform to manage.
- Inventory: Accurately forecast low stock levels to avoid out-of-stock situations, and synchronize inventory in real-time across all channels.
- Fulfillment: Streamline sales operations such as picking, packing, and warehousing; and integrate directly with relevant shipping carriers.
- Returns: Provide a place to complete end-to-end returns and pre-order items for return to your warehouse.
Benefits of Integrating Order Management System
Order management systems offer businesses a multitude of benefits. With this software, e-commerce orders will run smoothly from ordering to receiving products. Here are the outstanding benefits that help businesses operate efficiently and productively:
Automatic Payment
With this system, businesses can automate the entire payment process. That saves a lot of time, employees can focus on higher-level activities while shipping and invoicing are generated automatically.
Payment Via POS
Traditional payment methods are error-prone, time-consuming, unsafe, and inconvenient for your customers. Conversely, by integrating with a POS system, you can seamlessly process customer payments at the point of sale.
E-commerce Integration
To automate your entire order, you can integrate with any platform like BigCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce to automate your entire order. That is a kind of B2B e-commerce integration. As a result, it helps drive online ordering for your business, ensuring a streamlined sales process no matter where your customers place an order.
If you want to have a deep understanding of e-commerce, the article “eCommerce best practices” will provide all relevant information as well as the type of e-commerce that is popular today.
Money Savings
Businesses will save a variety of costs. First, they can reduce staff costs because the system streamlines and automates order-related processes. In other words, businesses do not have to spend money to hire employees to perform manual operations of importing goods or making payments. Second, businesses will save costs and effort when errors occur less, thereby fewer returns and less order error correction.
Real-time Information
By displaying real-time data, the system makes it possible for the company to react more quickly to any issues. As a result, customers will feel more satisfied with no delays. Moreover, the payment and product data is constantly updated, so the company will grasp the current status of their business.
Inventory Tracking
The order management system provides businesses with all information about receiving orders, completing orders, and shipping. Businesses can monitor the amount of inventory in the warehouse so that they will not worry about a shortage of goods.
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Customer service is always the top factor to grow a business. Customers’ expectations are always set at the highest level by businesses. Thanks to the correct order management system, businesses will ensure fewer mistakes, which helps retain customers later.
How to Integrate Order Management System with eCommerce?
The order management system has a significant impact on building the brand reputation of enterprises. Choosing and using this system appropriately will help merchants streamline their online business. As a result, customer satisfaction is maintained and company’s reputation is protected.
Effective order management is key to eCommerce store growth. Therefore, if you sell on any eCommerce platform, it’s very important to have the right set of tools to manage your orders.
Choosing an order management system is not the final step to maximizing success and efficiency. To use this system in e-commerce platforms, businesses need to integrate eCommerce sites with their inventory system to maximize its benefits. Integration is perhaps one of the biggest challenges in automating processes. If the integration is not smooth and robust, the entire order cycle can be stretched, causing customer service delays and high support costs. However, businesses do not have to worry because third-party integration platforms exist.
HexaSync Integration Platform is a middleware that helps organizations seamlessly automate business operations. Our software is for businesses suffering from disconnected systems, which costs them a lot of time and money. In particular, HexaSync can provide services to software applications outside of the services offered by an existing system and helps with communication and data management of distributed systems. In other words, HexaSync allows users to access all of their data in one source and set the rules for how it is organized and accessed. As a result, users will not be at risk of different data sources and formats.
With experience in integrating the world’s leading e-commerce or other services ERP integration, accounting integration, CRM integration, and more; our HexaSync will handle robust synchronization for your business. We always strive to bring the best service to businesses. Thus, your business activities will be optimized and effective as desired. You also won’t have to worry about integrating your order management system with your e-commerce because HexaSync will help you synchronize most strongly.
Final Words
In conclusion, an order management system is a great tool to support your business operations. Your sales process will be more precise and manageable. In addition, sales service and brand reputation achieved remarkable efficiency.
