Multichannel Order Management: The Difference Unification Makes

Learn how unified multichannel order management systems help retailers streamline operations, improve customer experiences, and reduce costs.

Two of the biggest trends in commerce appear to be contradictory: according to research, the market size of the ecommerce industry was estimated at $25.93 trillion in 2023 and is projected to continue growing. Other research, however, shows that 67% of ecommerce brands have opened retail stores.

If ecommerce is the growth area, then why are ecommerce brands investing in physical locations? The answer becomes clear once you zoom in: customers increasingly want to engage with businesses across multiple channels. These channels include online stores and physical locations, yes, but they also include social media networks, marketplaces, and more.

Multichannel strategies mean increasing complexity for retailers, especially when it comes to managing orders. With many different kinds of channels in operation, orders can come from many different touchpoints, making effective multichannel order management crucial.

For example, Frank And Oak, a Canadian apparel brand, struggled to unify their digital and physical experiences for a long time, despite the potential growth that could be achieved by doing so. “Our data tells us that the lifetime value (LTV) of an omnichannel customer is close to double that of a single-channel customer,” says Guillaume Jaillet, chief omnichannel officer.

“It was important for us to integrate those online and in-store experiences,” Guillaume continues, “But it needed to feel seamless, not forced.”

A unified approach enables companies to connect formerly siloed sales channels and reap the benefits of a multichannel approach. With a unified system like Shopify, brands have access to robust software that operates from a single codebase with features explicitly designed to work together, making it dramatically easier to manage orders across multiple channels.

The growing pains of disparate order-management systems and new channels

Customers want to be able to make orders across numerous channels. They might want to shop in-store and order online, or browse online and make a final decision in-store. Their baseline expectation is continuity between different surfaces as they do both.

With a non-unified management system, this buying behavior—which should be an exciting opportunity for retailers—becomes a point of stress. When order processing is fragmented across platforms, your most dedicated customers can become a strain on your system instead of a boon.

Inventory nightmares

A non-unified system makes it difficult to maintain accurate, real-time inventory across all sales channels. A customer could see an item in stock online, visit the store to purchase, and find out it wasn’t actually available, turning excitement into disappointment.

For example, at Venus et Fleur, a luxury floral brand, inventory management was stressful. "Managing inventory across ecommerce and retail locations was initially complex, especially during peak seasons where demand surges,” says Brendan Gorman, head of ecommerce at Venus et Fleur.

With seasonal revenue drivers, spikes in demand can lead to unreliable inventory, leaving customers unsatisfied. Retailers have to respond by stocking too much inventory, or leave money on the table.

Fulfillment frustrations

A non-unified system tends to lean towards fulfillment inefficiency, often requiring manual fulfillment across multiple channels. As brands add channels, each new channel can exacerbate fulfillment stress, dampening the desire to experiment.

Costs can mount, too, if a non-unified system makes it too complex to sustain optimal order routing. Eventually, delivery can slow down even as costs grow, especially if fulfillment regularly requires multiple shipping carriers.

Disjointed customer experience

A non-unified system makes it difficult, if not impossible, to see a single view of a brand’s customers. A customer might have an extensive order history, but if it’s online, in-store employees won’t have any insight. As a result, the potential for personalized experiences can be reduced, and service across channels can become inconsistent.

“People experience holidays and create memories in their homes. They need time to research the items that are going to become part of these memories before buying them,” explains Sam Mella, director of home experience at Jenni Kayne, a California lifestyle brand. “Our customers often do this research both online and in-person, so we have to ensure we’re providing a cohesive experience regardless of where they engage.”

Without multichannel order management supported by a unified system, customer experiences are liable to remain disjointed, and the best potential customers are liable to be disappointed.

Operational inefficiencies

A non-unified system can increase complexity, making it challenging to manage multiple separate systems, which can become complex and error-prone. It’s like juggling—the more things you have in the air at once, the more likely they all are to fall.

Over time, duplicated work, higher admin costs, and errors can accumulate, making the system even more difficult and costly to manage.

Reporting headaches

When your system isn’t unified, your data isn’t unified either. As a result, business growth can create complexity costs—a debt that comes due once it’s time to generate sales, inventory, and customer behavior reports. Crucial business insights can get lost in the complexity, limiting retailers from building a broad, holistic view of the business as well as a deep, analytical view of their customers.

Increase costs and complexity

While some software vendors believed that unified commerce could be achieved through integrations, we’ve seen several examples where an integrated (but not unified) commerce platform creates high maintenance costs and, over time, technical debt that can make operations complex and expensive to run.

BYLT Basics, a retailer of premium essentials, was wary of this risk. "As we entered the retail space, one of the big questions related to our growth was focused on our omnichannel focus and expansion," says Tyler Muzzy, director of retail at BYLT. "When you start adding more software and systems to the mix, it can slow down the tech stack and make it much more time-consuming to try to get the data or even just the answer to your question."

Expansion, entering new spaces, adding multiple channels—these moments should feel like opportunities. But if your system isn’t unified, these moments can feel like risks.

Unified order management system and the benefits of a seamless platform

A unified order management system, supported by a seamless unified platform, turns many of the flaws retailers find in other systems into advantages.

Seamless customer experiences

As online stores expand into physical locations and brick-and-mortar retailers expand their online presence, seamless customer experiences are becoming increasingly important. Customers expect multiple touchpoints as they make purchase decisions, but they also expect each touchpoint to seamlessly connect to the next without any interruptions to the experience they’re accustomed to.

For example, when Babylist planned to add their flagship store, they worried about how their customer experience would translate into the real world.

Mitou Nguyen, senior product manager of fulfilment and operations at Babylist, says that, with Shopify, they’re “able to start guests' profiles and look up previous transactions,” which is “key in creating a seamless experience in the event of a guest returning or a gift receiver stopping in with an exchange or return. Today’s shoppers expect that type of functionality, so it’s important to have.”

With a unified approach to multichannel management, Shopify can ensure that shoppers receive the experience a brand wants customers to have, whether they shop online, in-store, or a combination of both.

Real-time inventory accuracy

Offering multiple channels for ordering is an opportunity to provide customers with more ways to interact with your brand. If inventory tracking is inaccurate, these opportunities can turn into annoyances—and ultimately lost revenue.

For example, Swan Lee, a retailer and distributor of musical instruments, equipment, and lifestyle merchandise, migrated to Shopify and was able to take advantage of the multichannel order management functions made available by a unified system.

“As a customer enters the store, they can browse to look for what they’re interested in. But if they don’t find what they want, they can access our entire online inventory through our Shopify POS system,” says Evan Chan, omnichannel lead at Swann Lee. “They’re able to select the product that’s listed online and have it shipped to them directly, sometimes even on the same day.”

As a result of features like these, brands can maintain real-time inventory accuracy and ensure that customers can obtain the products they want, regardless of the channel they use.

Streamlined order fulfillment

A unified order management system allows brands to streamline their order-fulfillment processes. Once brands can optimize these processes, they can reduce costs, improve delivery speed, and work more efficiently with shipping carriers.

For example, JB Hi-Fi, the leading retailer of technology, consumer electronics, home entertainment, and home appliances in Australia, required efficient order fulfillment to maintain their scale.

“There is a lot to consider in a retail business as large as JB Hi-Fi is,” said Simon Page, chief information officer at JB Hi-Fi. “We have many different types of SKUs of many different sizes, 200 stores, and several channels.” With Shopify, Simon says, “We can break up the problem space, from pricing and product, all the way to fulfillment. Shopify fits in with that architecture really, really well.”

At scale, streamlined order fulfillment really pays off. Reduced costs and optimized prices mean more resources to invest elsewhere in the business.

Centralized customer data

A unified order-management system supports a unified, holistic view of the customer. Every time a customer makes an order, online or in-store, a brand has an opportunity to personalize the experience.

Unfortunately, according to Forrester research, most marketers have to use an average of eight different tools to run personalization programs, spending hours reconciling buyer identities from fragmented data sources. When customer data is strewn across different sales channels, personalization becomes difficult—when customer data is unified, personalization becomes practical.

For example, Orelbar Brown, a retailer of men's holiday clothing, operates hundreds of stores worldwide. “Supporting our customers’ shopping journey—which can begin at a store in Sydney, continue online from their home in New York, then end with a purchase from a store in St. Tropez—is always our priority,” says Jamie De Cesare, chief technology officer at Orlebar Brown.

According to Jamie, Orelbar Brown aims to provide a “tailored and personalized” experience, regardless of where a customer begins and ends. But until implementing the unified multichannel order management offered by Shopify, Jamie says, “It was challenging for us to seamlessly integrate accurate customer data across various touchpoints.”

With Shopify, POS, Orelbar Brown can access customer purchase histories, which “allows us to customize their visit, fostering better conversations and building stronger relationships.”

Increased efficiency and reduced costs

A unified order-management system enables brands to streamline their operations, allowing them to manage all orders and channels from a single platform. As a result, brands can eliminate complex integrations, reduce overhead, and increase overall efficiency.

For example, the used bookstore World of Books differentiates from other retailers based on a cost-effective repricing strategy. "The ability to execute on our very intense repricing is just super important, and it's only going to increase in complexity over time," says David Magee, product director at World of Books. "We had historic custom legacy implementations that were pretty unreliable."

With Shopify, World of Books can scale their best strategy, all while maintaining efficiency. "Volume repricing frequency is a source of competitive advantage to us," David says. "Shopify's ability to scale with us has been really important."

Data-driven decisions

A unified approach to multichannel order management also provides a competitive advantage, an increasingly important benefit in a tightening market. With access to comprehensive data and analytics, brands can gain valuable business insights into customer behavior, enabling them to serve customers more effectively and turn fans into brand advocates.

Similarly, brands can build an understanding of sales trends across all of their sales channels, allowing them to operate in maximum effectiveness within each channel and reshape the customer journey to boost customer loyalty.

Shopify: Your central hub for multichannel order management

Shopify is the ideal solution for retailers seeking effective multichannel order-management software. Ultimately, multichannel order-management software can only be as good as the platform it’s built on. With Shopify, the ability to serve multiple channels is built into the platform from the ground up, creating a range of benefits, including:

Unification across sales channels: With Shopify POS, brands can bring together online and in-store ordering, ensuring the seamless flow of data between online and in-person sales. According to EY's analysis, Shopify has the only POS on the market that is natively built as part of a unified commerce operating system (COS), enabling out-of-the-box unified commerce benefits.

Effective multichannel inventory through a centralized data model: Shopify centralizes product, order, and customer data in one place, enabling brands to take a holistic view of their business and of each customer. Personalization, one of the best ways to increase conversion rates and brand loyalty, is at its most effective when it has all this data to pull from.

Seamless omnichannel features: Shopify offers a comprehensive suite of features to support a unified customer journey, including the ability to consolidate all orders in a single customer profile. Similarly, with Shopify, brands can enable customers to make online purchases and easily return them in-store.

Efficient order-management tools: Shopify makes order management easy through features that enable efficient order routing and unify promotions across sales channels. As a result, brands can manage orders from different channels through a single system and streamline their order processing.

Extensibility and integrations: Shopify offers a broad and deep API and app ecosystem, enabling businesses to build upon the solid foundation the Shopify platform provides and customize their strategies to meet their exact needs.

Lower total cost of ownership: Shopify’s unified approach leads to a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). When brands have to manage separate systems for different sales channels, complexity is inevitable, as is tech debt, both of which lead to larger and larger costs over time. Research from a leading consulting firm shows that Shopify POS, for example, reduces TCO by 22%, on average, compared to competitors.

Multichannel order management is necessary in a multichannel world

Today, customers interact with brands across multiple channels and expect the same high-quality customer experience to extend from online to in-store and back again.

Non-unified systems make it difficult to manage all these sales channels, and brands using them risk obscuring business insights they could learn from trends across multiple channels. In contrast, unified platforms with multichannel order-management features built in enable brands to provide a truly unified experience.

To learn more about the benefits of multichannel order management and the advantages that a unified platform can offer, talk to the Shopify sales team.

Multichannel order management FAQ

What is multichannel order management?

Multichannel order management is the process of managing numerous sales channels, including online and in-store.

What is a multichannel inventory management system?

A multichannel inventory-management system enables brands to manage their product inventories across different channels, allowing customers to view inventory online that accurately reflects the inventory in-store.

What is multichannel fulfillment?

Multichannel fulfillment (MCF) is a service Amazon provides that picks, packs, and ships products on behalf of business owners. Shopify integrates with MCF, allowing Shopify users to import and fulfill orders relying on MCF from the Shopify platform.

What is a multichannel manager?

A multichannel manager is an individual responsible for coordinating and optimizing a company's sales channels, including marketing, sales, and customer service channels.