Your order management system captures incoming customer orders and allows you to review, process and fulfil them and send out customer email notifications at various stages of the order. It will also exchange information with any other software, such as stock control or order dispatch systems, that may be integrated with your eCommerce system.
Just as it is essential to encourage sales by promoting your online product offering, it is equally important to have an order management system in place that allows you to efficiently handle those orders when they start coming in.
This is because, once you’ve got your online retail store up and running, you’ll be spending much of your time dealing with the orders that come in through your website.
When your eCommerce website goes live it will generate relatively modest sales at first. But as you attract more visitors and become more accomplished at marketing your products online then, depending on the type of goods you sell, you’ll be working towards tens, hundreds or even thousands of orders every day.
So it is important to remember that an order management system has to be more than simply sufficient for your needs now. It should also be robust and adaptable enough to make the day-to-day administration involved in handling higher volumes of orders as painless and efficient as possible.
It makes both practical and economic sense for most new eCommerce undertakings to start out by using manual procedures to manage the order fulfilment process.
But even by the time an eCommerce business reaches just 10 orders a day these manual processes start to become a significant work burden, as it becomes increasingly more time-consuming to enter information manually across separate software systems that manage order fulfilment, inventory and accounts.
Manual systems also, by nature, carry a greater risk of administrative errors, which can have a knock-on effect on the service you provide.
This is why choosing an eCommerce web design solution with bespoke capability can be so important for the long-term growth of your online business. You will then be able to integrate your system with your other order management software, as and when the need arises, so that you can seamlessly process orders with the minimum of manual intervention.
The following are other important components of an eCommerce order management system that you should consider:
Your ability to deliver orders quickly and to correctly send the specific goods that the customer ordered is an important factor in the customer shopping experience. It also has a major impact on the efficiency and profitability of your online retail operation.
So make sure you have your own fulfilment procedures in place, both manually and digitally, to ensure you’re in a position to promptly fulfil your orders and dispatch them.