Selling things across many different places makes order management challenging. Customers buy from different website, for example, Amazon, Facebook, and stores. Keeping track of inventory and shipping orders smoothly is tough in this situation.
An order management system (OMS) can accelerate the process. It connects all your sales channels into one system. This creates a single view of orders and inventory. No more separate, disconnected data.
Magento OMS is an advanced system built for large omnichannel businesses. It links sales system with your main Magento website. Together, they help coordinate orders efficiently across channels.
What are the features and benefits that come with Magento OMS?
Centralize Multi-Channel Order Data
The core function of an OMS is to provide a unified view of order data across all your sales channels. This solves a major problem for retailers who sell on websites, marketplaces, social media, and physical locations — data fragmentation.
Without an OMS, orders from each channel exist in isolation in separate data silos. This makes it very difficult to get an accurate picture of your inventory and order status. A sale on your website may show inventory in stock, while in reality, you just sold the last unit on Facebook Marketplace and have no more available to fulfill the web order.
Magento inventory management eliminates this issue by pulling in-order data from each of your connected sales channels. You get a master view of orders across your entire business, regardless of their origin. Notably, this order data is updated in real time as new orders comes in.
Automate Allocation & Orchestration
Once you have centralized order data, the next step is streamlining order processing through automated allocation and orchestration.
Allocation involves assigning inventory to orders based on defined business rules and logic. For instance, you can set rules to allocate local in-store inventory to orders placed on your website for in-store pickup. Or fulfill orders from the warehouse nearest to the customer’s delivery address to minimize shipping costs and time.
Orchestration builds on allocation by adding workflows to process orders end-to-end. This way it automates the various order status updates and hand-offs between departments like fulfillment, shipping, and accounting. It ensures orders flow smoothly between picking, packing, shipping, customer communications, and other key steps.
These allocation and orchestration rules essentially act as blueprints for how your OMS should process different order scenarios. The benefit is replacing time-consuming and error-prone manual effort with intelligent automation tailored to your business processes.
Maintain Real-Time Inventory Counts
Accurate inventory data is critical for taking full advantage of an OMS. After all, inventory is the common factor that ties all your orders together. You can only automate and optimize order orchestration if you have reliable, real-time inventory information.
Magento order dashboard provides this by fully synchronizing inventory quantities with your order allocations. Inventory counts are instantly updated and reserved the moment an order is placed on any connected channel.
This tight inventory coupling prevents overselling and allocating inventory that is no longer available. It gives you a genuinely reliable picture of what’s in stock, what’s already committed to orders in process, and what’s still available to sell.
Such inventory accuracy feeds into smart fulfillment decisions, too. For example, you can automatically split orders and route allocations to different inventory pools based on product availability. If you only have three pairs of jeans available in your New York warehouse, but the customer ordered five, you can allocate the in-stock New York inventory and route the remaining two pairs to be fulfilled from your Chicago warehouse to avoid disappointing the customer.
Streamline Fulfillment & Logistics
With orders centralized and automated orchestration running smoothly, the Magento order management system also provides tools to simplify fulfillment execution.
You can quickly pick orders into batches for more efficient warehouse processing. Streamline packing with customizable packing slips, invoices, and labels. And print shipping labels directly through integrations with major carriers like UPS, FedEx, and the USPS.
Meanwhile, fulfillment metrics dashboards provide full visibility and reporting over key performance indicators like fulfillment cycle times, shipping status, returns, and more. Use these insights to identify and resolve bottlenecks before they impact the customer experience.
Enhance Customer Experience
The true impact of an effective order management system goes beyond just improving internal operations. By providing a smooth and consistent order experience, regardless of which channel a customer uses to shop and purchase, you build lasting loyalty.
For example, Magento order management software lets you offer cross-channel inventory visibility. A customer in your store’s app can check if an item is available for in-store pickup right from their phone. An online purchase can find out if a larger size or different color is in stock at their local retail location.
Likewise, the system allows you to source inventory from anywhere to fulfill orders how and where customers want. Buy online and pick up in-store. Reserve a product in the app and return it at a retail location. Choose the fastest or most cost-effective delivery option based on inventory availability.
These features make the end-to-end shopping experience seamless from the customer’s perspective. They don’t see the complex orchestration happening behind the scenes — just a convenient, personalized purchase journey.
When OMS Integrated with Magento Commerce Order Management Solution
While Magento OMS provides powerful functionalities on its own, its true power comes through integration with the rest of the commerce platform ecosystem.
As part of Adobe Commerce, it can sync seamlessly with sales channels, fulfillment providers, ERPs, and other tools connected to the central platform. This allows you to extend OMS features and streamline additional operational touchpoints.
For example, you can push order details into your accounting and ERP systems for automated payment capture and financial reconciliation. Customer communications like shipment confirmations, delivery updates, and return status sync directly to customer accounts and service management tools. Real-time analytics dashboards provide a 360-degree view for monitoring every aspect of OMS performance.
The possibilities for automation and efficiency gains compound significantly with each additional system integration layer. That makes choosing a robust, open platform like Magento 2 OMS and its native OMS extension such a smart long-term investment.
OMS Implementation & Change Management
A transformational solution such as the Magento order management system requires significant implementation effort and organizational change management. Its roll-out impacts almost every customer-facing operation — sales, fulfillment, logistics, customer service, and more.
Clearly defined processes and rigorous testing across each order workflow will be essential. Key stakeholders from all affected departments need to be involved from the start to get buy-in, incorporate process knowledge, and collaboratively design the future state journeys.
Change management is just as critical. Transitioning from manual, departmentally siloed processes to automated, cross-functional, real-time order orchestration is a massive paradigm shift. User training and support help your team understand the new ways of working, build confidence in the system, and encourage accountability during the transition period.
Given the effectiveness of impact, most retailers bring in partner resources to support successful deployment and change management. Look for an experienced Magento Development Services providers like Ignitiv with deep OMS implementation expertise to help maximize ROI from the project.
Is Magento OMS Right for You?
While natively integrated into Adobe Commerce, Magento Order Management is a full-fledged enterprise OMS suitable for large, complex businesses. It’s not an entry-level or mid-market solution.
OMS can provide immense value, but to realize those benefits, you need order volumes and omnichannel requirements that ensure a technology investment of this scale.
Ask yourself:
Do you transact over 10,000 orders per month across three-plus channels?
Do you have complex allocation, sourcing, and distribution requirements?
Do you have multiple regional or international warehouses/fulfillment centers?
Do you struggle with delays, errors, and lack of visibility in the order orchestration process today?
If the answers are mostly yes, then Magento 2 Order Management PWA is absolutely considerable. It can drive significant efficiency, cost reduction, and experience optimization for omnichannel businesses at an enterprise scale.
However, if you’re still relatively small or only sell through a single channel, you likely don’t yet have the complexity or advanced needs for a robust solution. A more basic order and inventory management system or workflow may be sufficient for your immediate requirements.
Conclusion
The key is aligning technological capabilities to your current and future operational demands. Don’t get ahead of yourself by investing in extensive automation before your business needs it, but don’t wait too long and find yourself severely limited by disconnected systems that restrict flexibility and growth.
