Magento Commerce Order Management

Today, we are going to discuss such an important Magento innovation as Magento Commerce Order Management (MCOM). Both Magento Community Edition and Enterprise Edition offer basic order management capabilities, and until the recent time, more advanced features were available only via third-party extensions, that’s why we’ve described 25 order management Magento modules on Firebear, but now the platform offers such features via MCOM. Does it mean that third-party order management plugins are no longer useful? Why do we need more sophisticated order management in Magento? What advanced features does Magento Commerce Order Management offer? Below, we provide answers to these and other questions related to MCOM.

Let’s describe the necessity of advanced order management features first. Although lots of online merchants demonstrate that it is possible to work with the default order management capabilities only, more advanced features are helpful if you need better control over your stock levels and orders. The problem is particularly acute in case of multiple sales channels or inventory sources, when it is easy to admit inaccuracy when all these channels and sources are not synchronized automatically within one system. Let’s consider an example when inventory is located in your warehouse, store, and at the same time you offer drop shipment, selling through your Magento store. With the increasing quantity of sales channels, you get more desynchronized system, because the default capabilities are not enough to connect everything together. Hence, the need for advanced management tools increases with the growth of your business.

As for Magento Commerce Order Management, it is a platform’s solution aimed at the maintenance of multiple fulfillment centers that is fast and flexible enough to combine your web and mobile channels, store and dropship networks, as well as internal and external fulfillment networks within one system. MCOM gathers data from all these sources and creates optimal rules for each individual order. It’s advanced features are:

• distributed order management
• omnichannel fulfillment
• inventory management
• payment, tax, and fraud
• analytics capabilities

Distributed Order Management. With this feature, Magento Commerce Order Management provides one view for all channels that streamlines the way you route orders to their fulfillment locations. Consequently, you increase efficiency and customer experience.

Omnichannel Fulfillment. By choosing Magento Commerce Order Management, you turn your stores, and partners into distribution centers. This improvement provides the ability to generate more sales, expose store inventory to potential buyers, and provide additional fulfillment options via an omnichannel fulfillment solution based on a cloud technology.

Inventory Management. This one adds full inventory visibility, so you will always offer goods that you really have.

It is also necessary to mention that the Magento Commerce Order Management solution processes web, mobile, store network, customer service, and marketplace data when it comes to demand and works with external / internal fulfillment, store, and dropship networks when it comes to supply.

Note that MCOM offers the fastest time to market in the industry, and you have two ways of its implementation. First of all, Magento Commerce Order Management can be added to your ecommerce store as a modular solution. Besides, there is the ability to implement it as a fully integrated tool. In both cases, you will seamlessly manage your omnichannel operations.

But what about existing third-party order management extensions? Will Magento Commerce Order Management make them obsolete? Alan Kent doesn’t think so and we absolutely agree with him. He insists on evaluating different solutions before choosing an option able to satisfy your business needs. Since all merchants have unique requirements, we will never get a universal tool, but Magento Commerce Order Management is among the most powerful options. Therefore, we recommend you to add it to your list of possible improvements, especially if your business operates within conditions described above.

Sources

• Magento.com
• Alan Kent’s blog