eCommerce is the new norm for companies that seek to grow revenue, acquire new customers and increase the average lifetime value of current customers. Enterprise commerce systems like order management are critical to supporting the online product catalog, fulfillment, shipping, vendor management and more crucial operational functions. This new Forrester report looks at the outlook for the eCommerce order management industry over the next five years. What should companies evaluate when switching an order management system and what is essential to continue the growth of eCommerce through operations?
Forrester identified four critical components of digital commerce: commerce management, experience management, order management and product information management. For a well-oiled online commerce machine, all of these pieces must work together seamlessly and have integrated information flow. What this looks like will vary depending on the systems you have in place, but there are certain criteria you should look for in your order management system to make sure the back-end fulfillment piece is in flux with the rest of your commerce systems.
Information Management
An order management system has a lot of moving pieces and processes a large amount of information including order tracking, invoicing, and account management. Ensuring that your system has organizational and process flow capabilities to manage the flow of information through integrated systems like the eCommerce platform and ERP will automate processes that can take a large amount of time when manually operated. An order management system with rules-based workflows that are customizable is critical to running your business in a way that is most profitable to your model. This information can also be parsed out to identify key trends in buyer behavior and ordering patterns.
Order Management as Customer Service
According to Forrester, many modern commerce companies are “reducing their acquisition and retention costs by converting full-serve customers into partial or total self-serve customers.” An order management system that lets customers see their order tracking and easily allows your customer service representatives (CSR) to track and manage orders will save on operational overhead of hiring a large amount of CSRs.
Critical to modern order management is customer experience enriching features and automated information flow. Interested in how SmartStock360 can provide these features? Let’s talk.
