Recent Articles

When you’re looking at the landscape of order management in retail, you can’t help but see a paradigm shift both in technology and best practices happening right before your eyes. You can’t walk into a mid-sized or large retail store without being told you can do business with them online, via mobile app, or through social media.  Omnichannel has already arrived. This shift was fast.  Retailers had just finished embracing multichannel eCommerce, and now find the industry has firmly moved on to omnichannel.  Unlike multichannel, where the focus is on channel selling only, omnichannel impacts every part of your business, including...

To all M.O.M. customers: I’m excited to announce the latest versions of our Multichannel Order Manager (M.O.M.), SiteLINK and BizSync products. Based on feedback from our customers, these software releases contain impactful new features that will help you grow, secure, mobilize and streamline your business. In 2016, retailers cannot take enough security precautions to protect customer data. Even smaller businesses find themselves and their customer data the target of malicious hacks and fraud as well as being assessed penalties and fees from their merchant banks for not meeting the latest PCI standards.  We invested significantly in updating M.O.M. 10 to comply with...

A customer walks into a store to return a pair of shoes. The store associate asks for a receipt, the customer hands them an email confirmation from an online purchase. These shoes were purchased on line, shipped from warehouse inventory, not sold in the store from the store inventory. How do you manage the return of an item that was bought online but is being returned to the store? How do you manage updating your inventory? Can your point of sale system (POS) access the original purchase and customer record to make the return, and perhaps exchange process, seamless for the customer? Does your...

Order Management has come a long way from the golden age of catalogers.  Back in the 1980’s, pre-Internet, there were two sales channels catalogers needed to worry about: the phone and mail-in orders.  Today, order management systems (OMS) need to work with every retail channel, or omnichannel, in order to be the central repository for all customer purchases, not just orders.  This requirement has been propelled by growing consumer expectations generated by a paradigm shift in the way they shop.  In addition, retail executives are looking for the OMS to reduce the number of systems necessary to manage orders, inventory,...

Omnichannel may be the latest buzzword, but it’s more than just a passing fad.  Omnichannel technology is the infrastructure that enables retailers and online merchants to give today's customer the shop-anywhere, ship-anywhere, pick-up or return anywhere behavior they demand. The previous generation of technology that many of today’s businesses rely on consists of numerous disparate systems that were not designed to operate together.  Today’s leading edge retailers and online trend-setters have replaced those systems with omnichannel-capable new systems.  Now you need to do the same thing to remain competitive – but how? Step one is to recognize that while omnichannel is complicated...