Customer-centricity is one of the key elements that drive a business toward success in today’s business world. Keeping customers at the core of your business is essential for all ventures, irrespective of their size and business model.
Customer centricity does not refer to offering proper customer support only, but it also means providing a wholesome experience, measuring customer performance indicators, and building long-lasting relationships with your customers to ultimately achieve success.
This is particularly important for wholesale businesses, as their revenue depends on repeated purchases by the same customers.
For this purpose, many wholesale businesses use order management systems.
What Is an Order Management System?
In e-commerce businesses, the seller and customer share a common goal: to get the product out of the warehouse and outside the customer’s door as soon and properly as possible.
For this purpose, every business needs a flexible and efficient order management system that can keep up with the modern customer demands and ensure a seamless customer experience.
An Order Management System (also called customer online management system) is a software that is aimed at helping companies track sales, orders, stock, and fulfillment.
It equips a business with the necessary people, processes, and partnerships for products to make their way to customers.
An effective customer online management system provides businesses with a centralized place to manage orders from all customers and orders from different sales channels. This can improve supply chain management and overall profitability of the business.
Key Features Of Order Management System
The key features of order management systems typically include:
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Order Tracking
The most important feature of any order management system is that it allows you to manage all aspects of your sales orders from a single platform, even if it is omnichannel.
Orders placed through the phone or your website can be easily tracked and recorded in one place. Most importantly, they are accessible from anywhere so you can track and view orders even on-the-go.
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Inventory Management
Any business that stocks different products has to deal with a multitude of inventory management challenges. After all, tracking inventory and checking inventory levels across different warehouses is not easy.
An order management system can simplify the inventory management process through practices like RFID tagging, item-level tagging, and automated inventory management so you never face losses again due to wrong counting of inventory.
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Support Multiple Payment Gateways
Customers love the flexibility. This means that merchants certainly benefit from offering their customers a wide number of payment options – cash on delivery, online payment, store credit, etc. – to complete their transaction.
Therefore, as a merchant, you should pay attention to order management systems that support multiple payment options. Also, do not forget to integrate fraud checking services for your own safety.
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Fulfillment Points Integration
If your wholesale business has several fulfillment points, fulfillment integration will allow you to define which one of the points you should use for a certain order based on its location and availability.
In case your business follows a drop shipping model or uses third-party services for order fulfillment, then this integration can help you stay up to date with the order progress.
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Shipping Services Integration
Those who are in this business for quite some time know that the merchant’s responsibility does not end with dispatching the order, because the order is not yet completed.
If you use a third-party shipping service, then you need to ensure that the parcel reaches your customer in a proper and timely manner. In case the mode of payment is cash on delivery, then this feature is helpful in keeping a track of payments.
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Customer Management
Customers are the core of every business, so making sure that they are satisfied is one of the key aspects of managing your business.
As a merchant, you need to assist your customers and answer any queries they might have. Integrating your order management system with the customer service system can help you do that more efficiently.
Choosing the Right Order Management System
There are certain factors you need to consider making sure that you select the most suitable order management system for your business. These include the following:
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Integration with Your Site
For e-commerce businesses, this is the most important factor. You need to ensure whether the order management system can easily integrate with your site, or whether you will have to build a whole new system around it. The latter can be too much work and effort so you should try to avoid that.
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Supplier Consideration
Since order management includes the whole supply chain, you must also consider whether the system will make it harder for you to purchase and process orders from the supplier side. This should not be the case as a good order management system is supposed to make things easier for you – not harder.
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Scalability
Under normal circumstances, a business experiences growth in the long-term so it’s a good idea to check beforehand whether or not the system will be able to scale as your business experiences rapid growth. If not, then it can make things slower and affect sales growth (which is not what you want).
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Reports and Analytics
Order management systems are not just for managing orders; they’re also great for analyzing your business performance. Besides revenue, shipping, and demographic reporting, an order management system can also help you track individual customers’ behavior that can ultimately help in offering a more personalized service.
Looking for an order management system that has all these features and more? OrderCircle is the right choice for you.
About OrderCircle’s Order Management System
OrderCircle is a B2B e-commerce company that offers innovative solutions for wholesale businesses. From order and inventory management to customer branding and analytics, OrderCircle offers an array of advanced business management software to make your work easier.
Here’s what you can expect from OrderCircle’s order management software (also called customer online management system):
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Efficient Order Workflow Management
We understand that it can be difficult to manage a wide number of orders as they are processed in different stages. Our order management software helps simplify this by categorizing all your orders in different categories, depending on where they are in the order pipeline. As a result, you get more control over your business.
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Real-Time Notifications
Forget about responding to individual queries about the order status with OrderCircle’s order management software. We ensure that both parties are kept updated at every stage through real-time notifications and alerts, as we understand that this is what wholesale customers expect at the very least in the current e-commerce landscape.
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Immediate Order Reporting
Our order management software is equipped with a reporting tool that can help you focus on what is important for your business. Export a detailed, customizable report of your orders so you can track the individual performance of your sales reps and see which items are selling best and which one needs to be cleared out.
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Fast Order Shipping and Tracking
OrderCircle’s customer online management system can be integrated with the best shipping providers. This will allow you to calculate delivery times and shipping rates, which will be sent to your customers automatically along with tracking details so that they can track their order(s) easily.
With all these features, our customer online management system aka order management software will offer the support you need for efficiently managing your wholesale orders and taking your business to the next level.
The best part? We offer a 30-day free trial with a money-back guarantee so you can back out anytime if you are not satisfied (and we will not let that happen).
Still not sure if you should opt for OrderCircle’s order management software? Get in touch with our representative today for a live demo.