If you’re currently selling online, there comes a tipping point where orders become too hectic to manage on multiple platforms. The time spent manually updating stock levels, producing labels, and selecting the best courier for your orders starts to hinder your ability to sell and fulfil quickly. In an ever-booming eCommerce driven market where speed is king, an Order Management System (OMS) could be exactly what you need to keep up with this booming market. We’ve outlined our top 5 benefits for adopting an OMS.
An Order Management System (OMS) is a platform that allows tracking of sales, orders, inventory and fulfilment from various channels. The order goes through the appropriate flow, changing its status, until it arrives at the final destination. The system is also a common board for all the information related to the order such as customers, sales channels, product information, inventory levels and location, suppliers, customer service and order printing, picking, packing and shipping.
8-10pm is the most popular time for shoppers to place orders, and this is probably (and hopefully) a time when you aren't at your computer. An OMS can automate the sales process, so as soon as your customer selects buy it's choosing the cheapest shipping method, generating despatch emails and updating stock across your sales channels - ultimately helping to improve the customer’s whole shopping experience - with no extra headaches for you!
For sellers with multiple marketplaces and couriers, it can get complicated to keep track of what goes where, and who ordered what. A strong OMS will have the functionality to provide detailed dashboards which display all your sales and courier channels in one place. This will help you make sure you never miss anything – giving you full control of your business.
Marketplace Integrations
One of the perks of using an OMS is that it automatically organises all of the statistics and insights that show product popularity, marketplace popularity and more. These insights can prove crucial to business growth and development as it lets you see the areas worth investing in and also helps prevent out-of-stocks.
By using reporting, you'll be able to identify unusual trends that might arise and act accordingly – this could be huge especially if you have long lead times on production.
A good OMS will also operate as a Warehouse Management System (WMS), allowing users to gain a complete overview of your warehouse, inventory and courier relationship from one easy-to-use platform – all accessible anywhere, anytime with real time updates on order, inventory and shipments. At MauveFulfilment we use a fantastic cloud-based system for ultimate efficiency, with features such as advanced location management, warehouse capacity map, multi warehouse support, mobile barcode scanning and detailed inventory tracking. All of these great features help our customers have a greater visibility over their stock, even if they are thousands of miles away.
By using an OMS, especially one operating using mobile barcode scanning and verification checks, you will notice a reduction in errors caused by previous manual processing. Most OMS are equipped to prevent these errors occurring at source, making sure that your customers are not left with a negative experience.
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