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. 

What is omnichannel order management?

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:

• Get real-time inventory visibility across all locations to prevent overselling and stockouts
• Implement intelligent order routing to fulfill orders from the closest, fastest, or most cost-effective location
• Improve order accuracy with supply chain-wide automation rules 
• Support flexible omnichannel fulfillment options like buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS)
• Standardize order management processes to deliver consistent customer experiences, regardless of their channel
• Simplify reverse logistics with a centralized returns process 

Multichannel vs. omnichannel order management

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

Signs you’ve outgrown your current order management system (OMS)

On the surface, your current order management system might appear to work. Here are some red flags that it’s actually holding you back:

• Stockouts are common. Lack of real-time data synchronization between sales channels and/or your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system can hinder inventory accuracy and availability.
• You lack available to sell (ATS) visibility. ATS makes sure that the inventory shown as “available” on each sales channel reflects what you can actually fulfill. Without it, you might oversell. 
• You cannot route orders intelligently. Can you automatically ship from the warehouse closest to the customer to save on shipping and offer faster delivery?
• Returns are a manual nightmare. If in-store staff can’t see online order history, shoppers don’t get the seamless customer experiences they’re looking for throughout the entire customer journey. 
• Your ship-from-store workflow is a mess. If the handoff process from an online order to retail store associates falls flat, fulfillment times can stretch, defeating the convenience of opting for this model. 

Pillars of an omnichannel order management strategy

Enterprise-grade inventory visibility

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:

• Display what’s in stock at a customer’s nearest store on their ecommerce website
• Schedule store operating days or hours for ship-from-store
• Set maximum order quantities for POS shipping each day

“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.”

Distributed order management and smart routing

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: 

• If the customer is in California, check the West Coast warehouse. If out of stock, check the LA retail store. If out of stock, split shipment from the East Coast fulfillment center.
• If the customer has paid for expedited shipping, outsource fulfillment to the closest regional 3PL partner. 
• For high-demand items, check warehouses with the highest inventory levels first to minimize stockouts and split shipments.
• If the order comes from a B2B portal, route to dedicated wholesale fulfillment centers to handle bulk quantities efficiently.

💡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. 

Store fulfillment

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. 

360-degree customer service 

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:

• Order status
• Returned items 
• Fulfillment options customers have used 
• Customer loyalty program participation
• Previous support tickets, including the channel used 

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. 

Build your omnichannel order management tech stack

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:

• Offer omnichannel experiences like BOPIS and curbside pickup with ease. 
• Integrate with ERP systems like NetSuite and Brightpearl through the Global ERP Program. 
• Scale during peak periods, such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday when order volumes surge.
• Automate marketing campaigns based on prebuilt segments that pull from 360-degree customer data stored in Shopify’s native CDP. 

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.

Master omnichannel order management with Shopify

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:

• Use intelligent order routing to cut shipping costs
• Deploy automation to speed up fulfillment processes and ensure consistency
• Offer omnichannel fulfillment options like BOPIS, ship-from-store, and curbside pickup 
• Efficiently process returns and adjust inventory levels accordingly