Selling in retail is not just about being present in the market; it’s about being everything, everywhere, all at once (yes, this is a reference to the Academy Award-winning film. Cheeky, huh?). It’s about being omnipresent or, in the retail context, supporting omnichannel movement. Modern consumers want to be present in every city simultaneously, get access to every trend, buy every prominent product in sight, and ensure they’re not falling behind the bandwagon. This also means that they expect to browse online, purchase in-store, and return via app – all without friction and losing precious time. Smart and conscious retailers know that the world has moved on from just web stores to omnichannel fulfillment and order management. The evolution in consumer behavior has made it crucial for retailers to adopt a robust omnichannel order management system that helps integrate every sales and fulfillment touchpoint into a larger consumer universe.
Let’s explore how omnichannel order management solutions can help your businesses to overcome fragmented retail operations, deliver stellar customer experiences, and optimize inventory and fulfillment with the ease of a magician flicking their wand.
What is Omnichannel Order Management?
Omnichannel order management, in super simple words, is the art of managing customer orders across varied sales channels, helping you streamline the entire process, from receiving the order to delivering it. An omnichannel order management system ensures that orders, regardless of where they originate from, are fulfilled efficiently using the most optimal inventory location (whether a warehouse, distribution center, or retail store) and cover desired consumer touchpoints.
Unlike traditional systems that operate in silos, omnichannel order management solutions offer:
Centralized inventory visibility: You get a single view of inventory across multiple warehouses, distribution centers, dark stores, physical retail stores, or anywhere else.
Real-time order tracking: You get end-to-end traceability on every order.
Automated allocation rules: Data from the omnichannel order management system helps you decide the best place to fulfill the orders from, be it a store or a warehouse.
Unified customer service tools: Brands get complete visibility (and even a single screen-view) of their purchase orders, return management, and refund processing.
Integration with logistics and warehouse partners: Gives you a unified system that integrates tightly with third-party logistics providers, apps, and systems into one world.
All of this effort is to achieve one unifying goal: helping customers receive their order from the nearest or most logical location and make the shopping experience that much smoother for them, while maximizing speed and minimizing cost for your business. With an omnichannel order management system, it’s a win-win!
Why Is Omnichannel Order Management Relevant in 2025?
Omni-channel Order Management Systems Market: Global Industry Analysis and Forecast
How does a consumer interact with a brand’s product? They might:
- Discover a product on Instagram
- Browse for a particular need and land on your product on the brand’s website
- Buy it via the brand’s app (plus point here if you have discounts running)
- Pick it up at a local store
- Check online and pick up from a store
- Return it through a third-party locker
This may or may not look like your brand’s funnel; your customer entry points, the middle engagement points, checkout funnels, and returns processing might look different, but a general consumer path will resemble a flow like this. This is proven by the statistic of 73% of consumers interacting with multiple channels at the same time.
The focal point here is that all of these steps involve complex inventory management, order routing, and coordination at each point of interaction, for which you might need omnichannel retail software solutions. Without omnichannel order management, the fundamentals of modern retail would most likely crumble.
The omnichannel order management systems market is expected to go to US$ 5.23 billion in 2029, it’s increasingly becoming a standard. Without omnichannel order management solutions, delivering this laser-focused yet well-oiled machine with exceptional experiences is almost impossible to run. Brands using outdated order systems would end up struggling with:
- Order duplication and overselling, with inflated stocks incorrectly represented.
- Disastrous stockouts, despite having more than enough inventory
- Uncoordinated logistics
- Inefficient resource utilization
You need omnichannel retail software solutions to get centralized control over every possible touchpoint and real-time synchronization that keeps the customer journey smooth.
Scaling Up with Increff’s Order Management System (OMS)
Increff’s omnichannel order management system is designed to meet the growing consumer demands of faster fulfillment and complete sync between channels. In-store experiences are still as relevant as online shopping has become. Increff’s OMS helps keep customers happy with impeccably fast omnichannel fulfillment. It acts command center for order orchestration, inventory visibility, and fulfillment agility. With Increff’s OMS, you get unified order processing, intelligent allocation, and speed-to-customer across all sales channels like app, web, third-party marketplaces, and more. Read more on how the product can help you achieve omnichannel fulfillment here.
Here’s what sets Increff apart:
✔️Real-Time Inventory Accuracy Across All Channels
Increff’s omnichannel Order Management System syncs inventory across stores, warehouses, and marketplaces, with near real-time accuracy. Imagine you’re drinking a glass of water – Increff processes inventory and order sync within those 15-30 seconds of sipping water. It ensures no missed sales due to inaccurate stock status. Every inventory node is treated as a live source ready to be fulfilled. You can hop onto strategies like ship-from-store, endless aisle, and store-to-store transfers by clubbing the near real-time sync of OMS with the endless in-store features offered by our product, Store Management System.
✔️ Unified Order Lifecycle Management
Whether it’s a website order, a B2B dispatch, or a return initiated in-store, Increff’s omnichannel Order Management System provides a single view of all orders and their statuses. No working in reducing silos, no manual errors and faster resolutions across customer support and ops teams.
✔️ Intelligent Order Routing & Allocation
Increff’s omnichannel order management solution(OMS) uses intelligent store hopping and order routing to the best-placed stores based on SKU availability, warehouse/store priority, regional SLAs, and even sales channels. This means consumers get products on time, and you get fewer cancellations, live delivery estimates on our interface, faster deliveries, and optimized logistics costs. And of course, more happy customers mean more brand goodwill and increased retention!
✔️Less Costs, More Sales
Increff’s omnichannel order management solution helps you optimize for costs and achieve your business goals better with smart fulfillment algorithms that help you plan ahead for speedy fulfillment and estimate delivery times in advance to find the best possible route for each order.
✔️ Flexible Order Fulfillment Flows
Increff enables advanced fulfillment capabilities like splitting orders by node or SKU, partial fulfillment and backorder handling, and auto-bundling and dynamic packing. It also offers unified digital and store-side return workflows to make work flow oh-so-smoothly.
✔️ Plug-and-Play Integrations
Increff connects seamlessly with 30+ ecommerce platforms, 3PLs, marketplaces, and ERPs, including Shopify, Myntra, Nykaa, Amazon, Flipkart, and Salesforce. Brands can go live in weeks, not months.
✔️ Enterprise-Level Performance
The system is built to handle high-volume spikes (e.g., festive sales, flash discounts) with zero downtime. Multi-brand or multi-country businesses can manage all catalogs and orders within one dashboard.
For example,
A leading global sportswear brand implemented Increff’s WMS/OMS solution and achieved:
- 300% increase in the rate of sales, leading to higher revenue
- 2- 3x increase in inventory turns
- 99.9% bin level accuracy
- 100% inventory with Amazon Prime status, leading to higher revenue on Amazon
- Reduced same-day SLAs for all channels from 3 days to 1 day, driving conversion and a better customer experience.
- 40% decline in inventory holdings – from 110 days to 65 days
- 400K worth of inventory managed regularly
- 28% reduction in order cancellations
Read more on how these results were achieved with Increff’s WMS and OMS systems here.
Benefits of Omnichannel Order Management
100% inventory visibility
Retailers using omnichannel retail software solutions can gain real-time visibility into inventory across all channels—physical stores, warehouses, and third-party marketplaces. This prevents overstocking and reduces missed sales due to stockouts.
Faster Order Fulfillment
Intelligent order routing enabled with order management systems adds a super boost to your fulfillment goals. With omnichannel order management solutions, you can choose the fastest fulfillment mode based on distance, stock availability, staff constraints, and more. For instance, if the nearest warehouse is out of stock, the order can be routed to a store with excess stock, minimizing delivery time and cost.
Upticks in Customer Experience
Omnichannel order management leads consumers to have options: Buy online, pick in store (BOPIS), ship-from-store, curbside pickup, home delivery, or locker returns. Giving customers the power to choose builds long-term loyalty and trust
Reduced Operational Costs
You’re allocating inventories smartly. You’re managing orders across channels with cloud-based omnichannel retail software solutions that help you automate a lot of the tedious functions. You’re also taking care of customer convenience with less logistical movement on your end. All this translates to fewer returns, reduced shipping expenses, and better warehouse utilization.
Unified Customer Service
Omnichannel order management solutions allow your company to process returns, modify orders, and resolve complaints faster, no matter where the order is from. Everything gets handled on one interface.
Closing Thoughts: Future of Omnichannel Order Management
The lines between sales channels are getting more blurry as we head into a faster, more AI-enabled world. Having an agile and responsive omnichannel order management system is a necessity in a market full of competitors, and only agility to draw on for an edge above the rest. The future of retail order management, as we envision it, is all about:
- AI-powered predictive fulfillment
- Dynamic inventory reallocation
- Automation in everything, including returns and refunds
- Cloud-native architecture for quicker and stable scalability
- Real-time reporting and actionable insights
As omnichannel retail software solutions and management systems evolve, brands will need to be prepared with solutions that can help them make data-driven decisions, adapt to the changing markets, and be suitable for both current and future retail needs.
