Technology innovation is often a competitive advantage for players in the eCommerce industry. The industry is heavily dependent on technology, which forms the basis of its business models. An Order Management System (OMS) is an example of such a technology that has proven to significantly ease the complex task of managing eCommerce operations. If you are into the eCommerce space, having a robust OMS is essential for long-term success. There are many such systems in the market; however we would recommend you to explore Ordercircle’s OMS which is one of the most advanced and easy to use system. An OMS helps in tracking orders from the moment of order placement until order delivery. It also maintains and analyses data for every activity in the process. This article details how an OMS can impact your business functions and in turn boost your eCommerce business.
1) Receiving Orders
An eCommerce business receives a large number of orders every day from multiple channels. Therefore, it is essential to accurately maintain track of all these orders. An OMS can enable you to do this very effectively by maintaining a record of:
- Products ordered
- Quantity ordered
- Customer Details (name, address, contact details, etc.)
- Date and time of order placement
- Order placement channel
- Promised delivery date (especially important for bulk B2B eCommerce orders)
These records are automatically organized and maintained electronically in a highly secure environment. Thus, in the future, these details can be easily retrieved from the back-end database.
2) Inventory Management
An eCommerce business usually has several warehouses at multiple locations. It is essential that when an order is placed, the nearest warehouse services the order so that:
- The lead time is minimized. This is an important factor for a better customer experience. A customer is always excited and happy to receive the order quickly.
- The order processing costs are minimized. On an aggregate level, this has a huge impact on the profits.
However, to ensure this, the warehouse must have an adequate stock of the necessary products. An OMS can ensure this in the following ways:
- Alerting the procurement manager of a possible shortfall in the product stocks, resulting in timely replenishment
- Enabling analysis of past orders to help predict seasonal demand spikes for specific products across locations
Also, Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled eCommerce websites can provide insights on the user interest for various products. Such insights in combination with the predictions generated by the OMS can be critical to predict the demand for various products with a very high level of accuracy.
3) Logistics Management
Due to the high volume of orders, an eCommerce business often has to move products in bulk. This is more relevant in the case of products that are not frequently ordered, as not all warehouses would stock those products. As an illustration, 20 orders are received for a 500-gram bottle of ketchup. Of these, 9 orders are from location A, 7 are from location B, and the rest 3 are from Location C. The warehouse at a Location D (nearest to these 3 locations) doesn’t have the stock of ketchup bottles. It would be more economical to move the 20 bottles in bulk from the warehouse which has stock to the warehouse at Location D. Subsequently, the orders can be dispatched to the customer’s address from Location D warehouse. An OMS will provide insights regarding such bundling for bulk movement of products based on the orders. This will positively impact the logistics cost and transit time.
Further, with Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, an OMS can optimize the logistic movements to minimize the costs. Also, an OMS can help track the delivery of orders on a real-time and order-specific basis. These details can be shared with the logistics management department and also with the respective customers. This provides oversight to the management regarding the movement of products. Also, the customer gets assurance and updates regarding the orders placed and expected time of arrival (ETA).
4) Automated Invoice Generation
Given the high volumes of orders processed in an eCommerce business, it is cumbersome to manually generate bulk invoices. As OMS comes to the rescue here as well. A robust OMS can automatically generate invoices in bulk. The system reads the order details and automatically generates the necessary documents with high levels of accuracy and efficiency.
5) Customer Servicing
An OMS plays a critical role in improving customer service and delivery. For example, an ML-powered chatbot can integrate with the OMS and provide automated chat support and order-specific details to a customer. Similarly, in handling customer grievances, the OMS can easily track the reasons for issues in delivery. The eCommerce business representative can quickly retrieve such details and provide the right answers, and in turn improve the overall customer experience.
6) Marketing Technology
Given that eCommerce businesses are ahead in technology adoption, it is certain that they invest heavily on Marketing Technology (MarTech). However, to get the best output of MarTech, it needs to be fed with large volumes of relevant data. An OMS can provide this as it maintains huge data reserves in a well-structured format. This aids the eCommerce business to implement highly effective marketing strategies, including personalized emails, intelligent product recommendations, customized product feature highlighting, and many more.
7) Other diverse advantages of an OMS
An OMS provides many more advantages as listed below. Ordercircle’s OMS provides you all of these and many more advantages that can help your business scale.
- Managing product returns: An OMS helps keep a record of reasons for return for each product return. This can be assessed by an AI-enabled system to determine the changes required to the product strategy.
- Record and analyze abandoned carts which in turn provides intelligent product recommendations and helps increase sales.
- Support for multi-currency transactions that highlight prices in different currencies automatically factoring in the exchange-rate movements.
- Support for multiple payment options such as Cash On Delivery, Credit/Debit Cards, Net Banking, Payment Gateways, and UPI
- Automated e-mail and SMS updates to customers to help them keep a track of their order delivery progress
- Automated support for tax compliance where any taxation rule changes are automatically reflected in the product pricing and invoices
Given the wide range of benefits that an OMS provides for an eCommerce business, it is a must-have to ensure improved business efficiency and growth.