The complete guide to multichannel order management 

Multichannel order management is an approach used by B2B and B2C retailers and 3PLs (third-party logistics providers) to handle orders and keep track of inventory across a range of sales channels. 

Order processing, fulfilment, shipping and inventory data is brought together. This allows teams to manage every part of the sales process from a centralised platform. Rather than juggling multiple platforms and disparate datasets, providers get a unified view of order activity, inventory and business-critical data, helping them to easily manage inventory across multiple channels.  

What’s the difference between multichannel and omnichannel?

Much like multichannel, businesses adopting an omnichannel selling strategy sell through several channels, including the brand’s website, social media channels (like TikTok and Instagram), multiple apps and marketplaces, and in-store. Channels and customer insights are integrated and connected. 

Here’s how omnichannel works: A customer begins their journey on the retailer’s website, adding an item to their cart. They leave without checking out and later visit the seller’s mobile app, where the item sits in the cart. The customer checks out in the app and confirms the collection in-store. All channels are treated as one, making the customer experience seamless, consistent and personalised at every touchpoint.

In contrast, with a multichannel strategy, each channel operates independently.

Here’s how multichannel works: a customer visits a physical store to try a pair of shoes they saw on the retailer’s Instagram shop. The shoes are out of stock in their size, but the store can’t search for the shoes in another location. The customer finally purchases them via the seller’s website but isn’t able to use the discount code because it only works in-store. 

Both are sound strategies for growth, helping providers use multiple channels to reach and engage customers. The key difference is area of focus: omnichannel is designed for a seamless customer experience, while multichannel emphasises product reach. 

Increase sales

By listing your products on multiple online marketplaces, they instantly become available to a broader range of customers, growing your sales and your profits. Companies with a strong multichannel strategy see a 9.5% annual revenue growth, compared to just 3.4% for single-channel retailers.

Improve brand awareness 

Multi-channel selling is great for driving brand exposure and brand awareness. Multi-channel listings dramatically improve your reach. By listing your products on the major ecommerce marketplaces such as eBay, Amazon, Etsy, and Argos, you can expand your audience reach, grow your customer base, and improve your sales opportunities. 

If we look at the statistics for Amazon, one of the UK’s most popular ecommerce platforms, 20% of shoppers use Amazon weekly, with the ecommerce platform boasting around 345 million monthly visitors. While eBay drives over 142 million monthly visits. 

Gain a competitive advantage

By making sure your products are available on multiple sales channels, you can make sure they get seen by your target customers alongside your competitors’ products. 

In addition, the more channels you place your products on, the better chance you have of gaining a competitive advantage on channels that your competitors do not use. This helps you capture more market share. 

Get new data insights 

By selling on multiple sales channels, your audience increases and diversifies. As a consequence, you get more interesting, actionable data on your customers’ buying behaviours, sentiments, buying journeys, and channel preferences. 

This rich data, that’s easy to review and analyse thanks to a centralised dashboard, can be integral to helping you make more strategic, data-driven business decisions. 

Retalon found that retailers who use predictive analytics (the practice of pooling and analysing data from multiple channels to help forecast future trends) can reduce the costs of inventory storage and management by 25%-40% and increase total sales by up to 20%.

Limited visibility of inventory across platforms

Managing stock across multiple channels and separate inventory pools is a challenge. Aside from being labour-intensive and time-consuming, getting the stock balance right can be difficult. 

Disjointed systems can reduce businesses’ control, leading to overselling on one channel, stockouts on another and lost customers across the business. Order delays, cancellations, and negative reviews can cause long-lasting damage to your reputation. Many customers will ditch a brand after just one bad experience. Whether it's a late delivery or poor customer service, 32% of customers say they'd walk away from a brand they love after a single bad experience. 

Fragmented inventory tracking can also reduce accuracy in forecasting, this can lead to situations like stock left sitting in your online warehouse when your High Street store has sold out. 

The right stock in the right place at the right time is essential for helping you to maximise revenue, keep cash flowing and deliver the best customer experience consistently. 

Manually managing multiple platforms

The more channels you need to manage, the more time-consuming and complex channel management becomes. 70% of retailers say they feel "totally overwhelmed" by the volume of manual admin they need to do to keep their channels running smoothly.

Different processes, workflows and rules across each channel demand your team processes orders separately on each platform, this puts extra pressure on your staff and your finances. For retailers and 3PLs relying on manual data management, errors become more likely, processing is less efficient and customer satisfaction takes a dive. 

Poorer customer experience

When it comes to retail, the customer experience is everything. Zendesk reports that companies that put the customer experience at the centre see an average 80% increase in revenue. The more channels a business sells through without a multichannel order management system, the more likely a business is to undermine their customer experience. 

Here are some of the ways that manual multichannel order management can undermine the customer experience by leading you to:

1. Run out of stock
2. Post the wrong product
3. Provide inconsistent shipping costs
4. Inadvertently draw out delivery times
5. Use different returns and refund policies across platforms 

Without full visibility across every channel from a centralised platform, customer support teams can struggle to resolve issues quickly. A lack of centralised customer data also means that teams miss opportunities for personalisation. When 76% of customers feel frustrated when their experience isn't personalised, the importance of centralised customer data becomes all the more apparent. 

Siloed data and missing insights

Data is the core of any successful business. Multi-channel selling gives you a wealth of information that you can use to make more strategic business decisions. 

Customer data, sales metrics, and inventory levels are all valuable insights that can help improve customer acquisition and retention and drive profitability and growth. However, when you’re using multiple platforms to store business data, it can be difficult to effectively pool and analyse your data. 

When you rely on separate systems, it becomes more difficult and time-consuming to manage real-time stock levels, monetary value, and stock turn. Siloed data makes insights such as top-selling items, most profitable products and purchasing patterns hard to access and unreliable as they may no longer reflect real-time developments by the time you process and analyse them. 

While the lack of a unified view across key metrics leaves businesses without the whole picture when it comes to sales performance, customer behaviour, and changing shopping trends. 

A multichannel order management system (OMS) automates and simplifies the order fulfilment process across multiple channels. This piece of software centralises and streamlines every aspect of the order fulfillment process, from order processing and shipping to inventory tracking and performance reporting. 

An OMS replaces labour-intensive tasks, eliminates stock issues and provides a real-time view of activity across all your sales platforms with full visibility, helping you deliver on time, every time, across every channel. 

Effective inventory management  

Multichannel order management systems give you a single, real-time view of your stock levels across channels. A unified, real-time view of stock levels across all your sales platforms and distribution centres gives you greater control. It makes inventory tracking, allocation and forecasting easier. 

By improving your inventory control, you can help reduce errors, increase warehouse efficiency and help make sure the right products are available when and where customers need them. In short, it puts you back in control.

Accurate order fulfilment 

Delays and mistakes can become common when you’re balancing orders across multiple systems. An OMS simplifies order management by consolidating orders from every channel and replacing manual management with automation. Businesses that switch from manual to automated order management reduce their processing time by 40%.

Fulfilment is faster, errors are fewer, and flexible options allow you to fulfil and ship orders in the quickest, most cost-effective way. Manual order management typically demonstrates an error rate of 3% to 5%, while centralised systems typically show a 99.9% fulfillment accuracy rate. 

Real-time, data-driven decision making

An OMS offers a single source of information and 360-degree performance insights that help retailers and 3PLs optimise operations across their entire business. 

Real-time insight and automated KPI reporting deliver a number of benefits:

1. They allow teams to spot bestselling products by platform.
2. They track and highlight customer buying patterns by channel.
3. They pinpoint workflow bottlenecks.
4. They help teams’ assess supply chain performance.
5. They help benchmark carriers by demonstrating who is meeting quality standards and who is underperforming.

An OMS helps businesses optimise their products, pricing, staffing and supplier strategies so every part of the process runs more efficiently and cost-effectively.

A better customer experience

As we note above, great customer service is essential to success in the competitive retail environment. An OMS can help you deliver a consistently positive experience across every channel. 

Automation can help deliver: data-led personalisation for a smoother purchasing experience, fast processing, on-time delivery, and accurate orders.
 
Integration and synchronisation make sure customers can rely on up-to-date stock counts, real-time shipping status and seamless returns or exchanges. When mistakes happen or customers have an issue, customer service teams can use an OMS to quickly access the data they need to answer customer queries and resolve issues effectively. 

Centralised order management 

With an OMS, teams can bring together orders and sales data from multiple channels and review them from a single dashboard. A single login and platform allows you to list products on all of your sales platforms. 

From order processing and fulfillment to real-time sales to stock and returns data, everything is centralised, reducing the stress that comes with managing multiple platforms and helping you to make sure you don’t miss any important information.  

Real-time order tracking 

An OMS means that companies can track products throughout the entire order management lifecycle. This supports teams to spot issues early and helps them to effectively manage customer expectations thanks to real-time insights and full data transparency. 

Multi-location inventory management 

Real-time syncing across all locations and channels makes it easy to visualise and manage your inventory. Centralised, live stock updates provide complete oversight to avoid overselling, minimise stockouts and allow more accurate demand planning and forecasting.  

Optimised fulfilment 

Intelligent shipping rules route orders to warehouses or fulfilment centres based on bespoke criteria such as proximity to customer or stock levels. 

With the option to integrate carriers and shipping partners, the entire process is seamless, speeding up delivery times, saving on shipping costs and creating a customer experience that exceeds expectations.   

Automated workflows

Automating workflows removes routine tasks and labour-intensive processes to free up time in your team. An OMS allows you to automate most steps within your order management process and allows for different rules across your platforms. From printing labels to choosing carriers, it’s easy to automate all your essential tasks using an OMS. 

Centralised data  

With an OMS, data is pulled from every platform to give you a single source of truth. Automated reporting and analytics tools provide key performance metrics and business-critical insight so you can make more informed decisions based on the most up-to-date data.

Mintsoft offers these impressive benefits for ecommerce retailers, whether they sell on 1 or multiple channels. We recently conducted a survey with customers using our Multi-channel Listings feature. Here are some of the things they said about the tool:

• “Simple & easy to use.”
• “User-friendly.”
• “Saves time.”
• “Wouldn’t hesitate to recommend.”

One customer told us that their time spent managing listings was reduced from one day to 20 minutes.

Multichannel order management software delivers speed, automation, simplicity, and full data visibility. Access Mintsoft multichannel order management software was custom built for 3PLs and ecommerce brands. 

Whether you’re ready to scale or struggling to manually manage multiple channels, Mintsoft was designed to help support and simplify order management. The Mintsoft OMS streamlines your order, warehouse and inventory management processes, helping you to reduce errors, improve cost efficiencies, drive sales, and deliver a better customer experience.

From centralising all your sales channels and order activity to automating picking, packing, shipping and tracking, Mintsoft’s cloud-based software simplifies the most complex workflows across multiple platforms. 

Intelligent tools remove the need for manual multi-warehouse management, put you in complete control of inventory across channels and integrate business-wide systems, allowing data-rich reporting and at-a-glance KPI tracking across your operations. 

Ready to help drive sales, get more time in your day, reduce errors, and deliver a better customer experience with a market-leading OMS? Book a demo today.