An omnichannel strategy goes beyond making your products available on the channels your customers use. A seamless front end may be able to hide messy logistics behind the scenes, but if order management isn’t coordinated, omnichannel retail becomes an expensive investment.
Omnichannel order management connects your sales channels. This unified system lets you route and manage orders intelligently across warehouses, stores, and third-party partners, ensuring customers receive the right products on time, through their preferred delivery or pickup option.
When fulfillment is orchestrated this way, you improve customer satisfaction because inventory stays accurate, shipping is fast, and orders arrive as expected. You’ll also unlock operational efficiencies and cost-savings by optimizing decisions across your entire commerce ecosystem.
This guide walks you through how to streamline the omnichannel order fulfillment process, with examples and features to consider when rolling out a new order management system.
Omnichannel order management is a system that unifies order data from multiple sales channels, including your online store, social commerce platforms, marketplaces, B2B storefronts, and physical stores. Think of it as the central nervous system of your commerce operation.
With an enterprise omnichannel order management system, you can:
Multichannel management was an early evolution of ecommerce. It happens when each sales channel operates independently. Orders are managed on the platform through which they are placed, fulfillment rules differ, and customer data is fragmented.
This multichannel approach causes issues, like inconsistent customer experiences and poor inventory management. For example, if you sell on Shopify and Amazon, inventory is siloed or manually updated across both channels.
Omnichannel is the next step in order management. It offers a unified view of fulfillment, giving flexibility to cater to customers who use more than one channel in a single purchase decision. Using the same example: with an omnichannel order management system (OMS), an in-store return would update the inventory available on Amazon instantly.
📚Read more: Omnichannel vs. Multichannel: Key Differences
On the surface, your current order management system might appear to work. Here are some red flags that it’s actually holding you back:
You don’t want too much inventory on hand to bloat carrying costs, but stocking too few units can result in stockouts that drive customers to competitors. An omnichannel OMS solves this challenge—but only if it offers enterprise-grade inventory-data visibility.
Sustainable footwear brand Allbirds, for instance, previously grappled with inefficiencies in their inventory management processes. Retail stores stocked each size of every shoe, meaning each location often stocked products that didn’t sell well in that particular store.
“At the end of each season, we would regularly pack up any slow-moving or out-of-season merchandise and ship it back to our warehouse, which was an inefficient use of time and money,” says Micah Nelson, the brand’s director of product management.
To make matters worse, Allbirds’ old infrastructure meant they’d encounter stockouts. Online shoppers couldn’t see inventory at their nearest store, and only units stored in their warehouse were allocated to online orders.
Allbirds adopted Shopify’s unified commerce platform to solve these challenges. One lucrative addition was the ship-from-store feature. With a few tweaks from Shopify APIs and third-party apps, Allbirds could now:
“With our sales channels unified on Shopify, we’re able to provide a consistent shopping experience between retail and ecommerce customers,” Micah says. “We have more opportunities to delight our customers while providing greater flexibility to corporate teams. Our customers have benefitted from faster shipping, a wider assortment both online and in stores, and the convenience of buying and returning in either direction.”
Many enterprise brands expand their fulfillment center footprint when order volumes scale. If you’re expanding internationally, for example, you might operate a warehouse in Germany or work with a local third-party logistics (3PL) partner in the region to handle orders from European customers.
But there are scenarios where order routing is less clear-cut. Smart routing applies logic to incoming orders to determine the most appropriate fulfillment center based on factors like cost, inventory availability, and shipping speed.
Examples of what order routing might look like:
💡Tip: Shopify Flow has plug-and-play templates to automate inventory and order management. Hide out-of-stock products, generate packing slips, and more—using prebuilt workflows.
Retail stores make ideal micro fulfillment centers, especially if they’re located closer to customers. The less distance a parcel has to travel, the lower your shipping costs. Store fulfillment also enables fast (often next-day) delivery, which 23% of online shoppers prioritize.
The challenge, however, is managing the logistics of in-store fulfillment models like buy online, pick up in-store and ship-from-store. Delays, poor customer experiences, and inventory availability issues occur without real-time data synchronization across systems.
Home furnishing brand Parachute adopted Shopify’s unified commerce platform to solve this challenge. Online shoppers can place an order and schedule in-store pickup at a store where their product is in stock. Store associates view daily collections on the point-of-sale (POS) interface and prepare orders for easy handoff.
“Being able to leverage Shopify’s buy online, pickup in-store feature actually allows us to tell our online customers that we even have stores,” says Parachute’s SVP of operations Meg Marsh. “This allows us to drive traffic to the stores where we know that customers have a really great experience.”
This store fulfillment strategy has proved lucrative. After switching to unified commerce on Shopify, BOPIS generated 1,300 orders in the fourth quarter alone—roughly 35% of Parachute’s annual BOPIS volume and 48% of total annual BOPIS revenue.
Customers expect you to understand their full history, regardless of where they bought, how the order was fulfilled, or where they’re asking for help. Omnichannel order management systems help with this. They show:
This data, stored in a centralized repository, empowers support agents to edit orders, issue partial refunds, or reroute shipments before they leave the warehouse.
For example, if a customer contacts support after placing an order to change their delivery address, the OMS can pause fulfillment, reroute the shipment to a closer warehouse, and update the carrier label in real time. This avoids a cancellation, return, or reshipment, while also delivering excellent customer service.
💡Tip: Shopify has a native customer data platform (CDP) that compiles every piece of data you’ve collected on each shopper—no custom coding required. You get complete insight into your customers and the orders they’ve placed.
Unified commerce is a step above omnichannel order management. Instead of diverting order data into a centralized system, it unifies all of your business functions—including inventory, customer, and sales data—into a single business brain.
Shopify’s unified commerce capabilities, in particular, offer the ability to:
Jewelry brand Astrid & Miyu is just one omnichannel retailer leaning on Shopify’s unified commerce platform to manage fulfillment operations. They were growing rapidly on their previous platform, but customer data was fragmented, which made it difficult to personalize the omnichannel experience for each individual shopper.
To sustain their growth and improve the omnichannel experience, Astrid & Miyu migrated to Shopify. They now had a 360-degree customer view at their fingertips—a summary of each shopper and their activity both online and offline.
With Shopify, Astrid & Miyu noted a 5x increase in customers who purchased more than four times while shopping omnichannel. They also observed 40% higher lifetime value among repurchasing customers who shop omnichannel versus online only.
“Shopify’s big singular view of our customer is the secret power to scaling fast and managing international growth,” says senior ecommerce manager Molly Allen.
Stockouts, high shipping costs, and inconsistent customer experiences are key signs it’s time to upgrade your order management process. With an omnichannel order management system, you can operate efficiently while meeting customer expectations for speed, flexibility, and consistency.
Shopify’s unified commerce platform has everything you need to manage orders wherever they come from. Each order is routed to the unified dashboard, where you can:
The aim of an omnichannel order fulfillment strategy is to unify orders across all channels and locations so each order is fulfilled from the best possible source based on speed, cost, and inventory availability. It ensures consistent, flexible customer experiences—such as buy online, pick up in store or return anywhere—without causing operational drag.
The four Cs of omnichannel are customer experience, context, collaboration, and content. Combined, they help enterprise brands deliver seamless experiences across multiple channels without sacrificing operational efficiency.
In omnichannel commerce, an OMS (order management system) is the centralized system that handles orders across every sales channel and fulfillment location. It manages inventory, order routing, and fulfillment so that each customer experience is consistent.
An enterprise resource planning (ERP) system manages a company’s core internal operations like finance, inventory, and procurement. An order management system (OMS) manages customer orders across all channels, ensuring they’re fulfilled efficiently, consistently, and accurately from the optimal location.
