"Modern consumers demand seamless shopping experiences, fast and accurate delivery, and easy returns. This means online omnichannel merchants need a flexible and powerful Order Management System (OMS. One that lets them adapt to changes in demand without long expensive IT projects. Order management systems have evolved in the short history of ecommerce. Early OMSs were monolithic, rigid, and expensive to maintain. Modern Order Management Systems need to be flexible and scalable. As a result, today’s OMSs use an API-first approach so they’re easy to connect with your other commerce apps. Below are 7 features you should expect from a modern Order Management System.
Retailers had a separate web store, mobile store, kiosk, etc. and each one had its own product and pricing modules. Keeping track of all the data in those systems was a challenge. As a result, early OMSs had to consume that data, including pricing and promotions, so they could act as a single source of truth. Then came the ‘all in one suite’ solutions. Some vendors of ERPs, Warehouse Management or CRM systems built complementary solutions.
This included Distributed Order Management. Others augmented their offering through acquisitions and packaged them up as suites. The promise?
Reduce the pain of integration by offering pre- connected solutions that (ostensibly) worked seamlessly together out of the box. The reality? Acquired suites were often poorly integrated. Some required separate logins and data wasn’t freely exchanged between the systems. Meanwhile, the home-grown suites often lacked the robust feature set of a best-in-class solution. If you chose a suite, there was always a tradeoff between integration and capabilities.
But there’s good news: the evolution of web APIs means you no longer have to sacrifice one for the other."
