Meet Canary7
Magento Order Management
Did you know that you can improve your Magento experience with the right order management system?
Meet Canary7
Meet Canary7
Magento Order Management
Did you know that you can improve your Magento experience with the right order management system?
Since Magento was founded in 2007, it has been helping thousands of retailers and brands with their eCommerce journey. With functionality that empowers businesses to tackle the unique challenges posed by the eCommerce world, Magento ensures that all big and small ventures get out there and dominate their niche with a one-of-a-kind online store.
Setting up your eCommerce project on Magento will help you expand your operations, tap into a bigger target audience, seamlessly adopt a multichannel business model, and open your business to a range of other benefits. However, with all the good things that Magento brings to the table, it also brings some complications – for example, although it brings more traffic to your shop, it also brings a massive volume of orders, which means there is an additional responsibility on you to handle every order as well.
With the help of a Magento commerce order management system, you can tackle that aspect and many other order-related problems that you might face on Magento.
This guide covers everything you need to know about Magento order management – so keep scrolling!
Magento: Covering The Basics
First, let’s cover a few basics about Magento in general. If you plan to kick start your eCommerce store on Magento or improve your existing Magento store, you will benefit from this information!
What is Magento?
Magento is an eCommerce platform that uses open source technology to help merchants set up an online store equipped with leading eCommerce solutions. With Magento, you get everything you could expect your online shopping experience to have. From efficient site management to help with SEO and marketing, there is little that you don’t get with your Magento store.
Benefits of a Magento Shop
So many businesses gravitate towards Magento as an eCommerce platform because it offers a range of benefits for online merchants that want their store to make strides on the internet. Some of these benefits include:
1. Flexible Content Management
Magento gives you complete autonomy over the actual store, which means you can customise your page whenever you like. It is user-friendly, for both you and your customers and hence gives businesses that could be more technologically evolved a fair chance at building an online store that works as well!
2. Mobile-Friendly Version
It is essential for any business to support mobile setting, since most users are likely to view your shop from their mobiles. Magento is quite mobile-friendly, and its shopping carts are responsive enough to be easily viewable on any mobile device, including smartphones and tablets.
3. Search Engine Optimisation
eCommerce businesses would do anything to rank higher on search engines, since it is a fool-proof way of bringing in more traffic and attracting more potential customers. However, ranking as an online business can be challenging. Yet, Magento has incredible features available for SEO that can help companies rank better on significant search engines, notably Google.
4. Supports Large Volumes of Products
Magento is very spacious – meaning that it can support up to 500,000 products on just one site. Not only that, it lets you receive more than 80,000 orders per hour, which is a significant number if you are looking for a platform that can allow you expand your operations and serve more customers.
5. Easy Upsells
Magento has built-in upsells, which means that it is straightforward for online merchants to add browse related prompts on checkout and product pages. This refines the customer experience and helps you shoot up your sales!
6. Community Support
Many businesses choose to turn to Magento because there is a big community that can support you with your problems and make navigating the eCommerce world a lot smoother. It helps you build connections, and grow your business together.
7. Cost and Time Efficient
Another thing that makes Magento an excellent fit for businesses, especially those just starting is that it is cost and time efficient. In that regard, you can save on these crucial resources and focus them on other factors within your business.
Features Offered by Magento
To make sure your Magento store is as powerful as it can be, it is good to be aware of all the features Magento provides. This list is long, so get your notebook out and buckle up as we go through all the ways you can use this platform to make your eCommerce venture even more successful!
Marketing Features
- Customer groups
- Product bundles
- Recently viewed and compared products
- Persistent shopping cart
- Free shipping options
- Minimum Advertised Price (MAP)
- Landing page for categories
- Newsletter management
- Send to a friend for all visitors or registered users only
- Send wish lists by email
- Polls
- Related products
- The option to restrict to products/stores/categories
Site Management
- Customizable templates
- Customer support in multiple languages and for different currencies
- Content Management System for informational and landing pages
- Automation of tax rates according to a customer group, product type, or location
- CAPTCHA functionality to keep out the bots and spammers
Catalogue Management
- Grouped and bundled products
- Different customer groups with different price points
- Sell virtual products
- Unlimited product attributes
- Automatic image resizing and watermarking
- Search results rewrites and redirects
- RSS feed for low inventory alerts
- Downloadable/digital products with samples
Customer Service
- Contact Us form
- Order and account update emails
- Customizable transactional emails
- The ability to create and edit orders from the admin panel
- Advanced customer accounts
- Order history with status updates
- Order tracking from account
- Password reset email
Search Engine Optimization
- Features that are wholly search-engine friendly
- Google Site Map
- The ability to create search-engine-friendly URLs
- SEO meta-information for all aspects of the site, including products.
- Auto-generated site map for display on site
- Auto-generated popular search terms page
- Google Content API for shopping
These features make Magento a holistic platform which means that there is a lot of space for businesses to do whatever they want to do with their eCommerce store.
However, the long list of features and functionalities doesn’t mean that Magento doesn’t present any business challenges – it does, and at times, these challenges can be overwhelming, especially if you are a small business hoping to make it big out there.
Magento: The Biggest Challenge
Although there are quite a few challenges that Magento as a platform poses, the one that can cause the most severe setback to your operations is its need for more support for order management and inventory management.
Unfortunately, the Magento platform doesn’t go beyond basic analytics to help you manage your orders, especially your inventory. For example, although it will show you your best sellers, it won’t show the status of all the products you have at your warehouses, which means you can’t sync your stock availability with your orders, which is a vast hold back for your business.
When it comes to order management and inventory management, you must also take into account the fact that Magento is a pretty complicated platform – it is not always easy to streamline all the necessary aspects, because you need to know how to navigate Magento before you get to the stage for you eCommerce store.
Does this challenge mean you should stop using Magento? No!
These challenges can be easily countered with the help of a robust Magento order management system. An order management system can be a much better alternative to Magento’s own, in-built order management features, which is why an OMS is the first choice for businesses planning to optimise and empower their Magento shop.
In the next section, we will get into the details of a Magento order management system, what kind of features it offers, and how it may be a better fit than Magento itself.
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Magento Order Management System: Everything You Need to Know
Why is an Order Management System Important?
Order management is an essential aspect for any business, which is why order management systems are considered a crucial tool to ensure the success of any business. With the help of an order management system, you can streamline all stages of your order fulfilment and ensure that not only are you sending the right products to your customers on time, but also that you are offering them an overall customer service and experience that contributes towards your customer retention as a whole. In simple words: an order management system provides just the foundation you need for your business.
General Benefits of an Order Management System
Are you curious about how an order fulfilment management system can help your business in general? Some benefits of an order management system (OMS) include:
- Efficient order management
- Centralised customer experience
- Multichannel store fulfilment
- Global inventory and stocking support
We talk more about these benefits and some other important features of order management systems in our Definitive Guide to Order Management Systems, so check it out if you want to learn how order management systems play an important part in ensuring the success of your business.
What is a Magento Order Management System?
A Magento order management system is an order management system that is Magento-friendly, and can perform all its functions in connection to Magento. The job of a Magento order management system is therefore to streamline all the orders you get from Magento, and sync them with your inventory, warehouse, and any other sales channels that you might have.
Why You Need a Magento Order Management System
If you are wondering why you need an order management system for Magento, it’s okay – after all, once you consider the long list of features Magento provides within the platform, it is only natural to feel sceptical if you may need anything else.
However, the thing that you must remember is that Magento is an eCommerce platform. As such, its ultimate job is to provide you with a platform to help you set up an online store with enough traffic. Although a part of it includes order management, it is essential to understand that this will never be its ultimate purpose. It is not dedicated to helping your business tackle the unique challenges of order management, and hence fails to be an adequate solution in that regard.
On the other hand, a Magento order management system is a dedicated, specially designed software solution that is mainly there to help you combat the particular issues that you are likely to face in the way of order management. Moreover, Magento is a monolithic platform, meaning that customers pay for the whole platform and whatever comes with it.
With an OMS, this is rarely the case because the customers have enough autonomy to choose the features they want. For example, want to pair your order management system with an inventory management system and a warehouse control software? You can do this easily, as opposed to dealing with Magento which means restricting yourself only to the solutions provided by the platform itself.
Features of a Magento Order Management System
When it comes to how exactly a Magento order management system helps you optimise your eCommerce store, you must understand that it all comes down to its features. Although each order management system is likely to vary in nature, we can agree that pretty much all order management system that offer an integration with Magento can help you with the following:
1. Real-Time Updates
With the help of a Magento order management system, you get real-time inventory updates – which isn’t the case if you rely only on Magento’s in-built features. A good order management system will help you get updates on your inventory levels and keep you in the loop throughout the fulfilment procedure; be it the pick and pack stage or the shipment stage.
2. Support for More Orders
Although useful in a way, Magento’s basic analytics can’t be enough for peak seasons, when you are getting thousands of orders. To stay on top of your sales activity, you need something more advanced, which a Magento order management system provides you with. No matter how many they are in number, your Magento orders will be synced to your OMS, which will help you manage your orders in a much more advanced and significant manner, and that too at the speed of lightning.
3. Efficient Order Processing
Using a Magento order management system means bringing speed and efficiency at the centre of your operations. This means that no matter how many orders you get every day, you can process them super fast, which in turn means you get a fair chance to impress your customers. With such features, your customer retention becomes much more improved than if you were sticking to the features provided by Magento alone.
4. Omnichannel Sync
Order management on Magento means you can only manage orders you get on Magento. While this may suffice if you are a single-channel business, it simply doesn’t do the job for companies adopting the omnichannel sales model for their business! If you are such a business, you require interconnectedness between all your channels; whether it is Magento, Amazon, or a physical store. Not only would you want to centralise orders that you get from all these channels, but you would also want them to be connected to various warehouses you have in different locations, and this can only be done with the help of a Magento order management system.
5. Integrations to Magento
All aspects of your retail setup should be integrated with Magento. This will include orders, but also stock, payments, prices, and shipments – all the information you have on these things must be integrated with Magento to ensure that your eCommerce journey is on track – and you can do this quite easily with the help of a Magento order management system.
If an order management system offers these five features, it is fit for use in connection to Magento, and can help you optimise your Magento store with little to no hassle.
Magento Order Management – Best Practices
So – you’ve got your Magento store up and running and have a Magento order management system to make your job easier. What next?
Of course, ensuring that order management is seamless goes beyond this. There are a few things you need to do yourself to ensure that not only the order management tools you have in place are being used productively, but also that your order management processes are contributing towards the overall success of your business.
We have compiled a list of tips and tricks that will help you tackle Magento order management challenges, and make overall Magento order management a lot more efficient:
1. Centralise order related data.
If you are selling your products on multiple channels, you must aggregate the order data from these stores with the order data you get from Magento. This centralised data will help you gain a holistic view of your order activity. Syncing this data is very important because if you deal with it separately, chances are that it will manifest as a bottleneck in your supply chain.
An Magento order management system can help you achieve all this and more. However, your manual efforts also come into play here. Although you will be automating and uploading and syncing this data with your order management system, you must also regularly check all these channels individually to ensure that everything is in place.
2. Maintain inventory accuracy.
To ensure that the order management processes in your Magento store are seamless, you will have to ensure that the inventory activity and stocking handling in your warehouse are also seamless. For this, you must have an inventory management system that streamlines all aspects of keeping a stock and integrates your inventory with your order management system.
Good inventory management also involves real-time tracking, which can also be achieved with robust order management and inventory management tools. However, it also consists in building a culture in which you and your staff regularly check your stock, and ensure that there are no discrepancies – so, if you want to optimise your Magento store, you will be focusing more on your inventory management processes!
3. Ensure visibility across the fulfilment process.
You need to ensure that there is complete visibility across your supply chain. This is because only where there is full visibility can you address the shortcomings in your business performance and ensure that all the aspects of your fulfilment procedure are aligned to meet customers’ demands.
To do this, it would be helpful for you to collaborate with your suppliers and ensure a clear communication line between you. This way, you will ensure that you have all the relevant product data at hand and sufficiently avoid any discrepancies from miscommunication.
Ensuring visibility across different aspects of the supply chain will also involve taking all of your sales staff on board and ensuring they have access to real-time updates on orders and inventory. This will ensure that it is not only you, but the rest of your team that is in line with increasing the visibility of your order management procedures.
4. Automate wherever you can.
As mentioned earlier, there should be some manual effort from your end to ensure that your Magento shop is optimised to entertain as many orders as possible. Yet, it’s best if you try and automate wherever you can.
This is simply because with the help of automation, you can ensure that all your processes are being completed at lightning fast speed, and that your customers don’t have to wait a lot before their orders are correctly processed!
Wrapping Up: Magento Order Management System
Magento order management is an essential aspect of optimising your store – but luckily, you can rely on a Magento order management system like Canary7 to take care of it all!