Order management isn’t just about moving boxes. It’s about connecting every part of your ecommerce operation to deliver on customer promises. In this competitive ecommerce landscape, managing orders after purchase can make or break the customer experience, your shipping costs, and your ability to scale.
Let’s explore the order management process flow — what it looks like in practice and how to optimize it for cost and customer experience.
Key highlights:
Order management is how businesses track and handle everything that happens once a customer clicks “buy” on their website. It covers the whole journey — from processing the order and managing inventory to picking, packing, shipping, and even handling returns.
A strong order management process flow keeps operations running smoothly and helps ensure customers get what they ordered, when they expect it.
This process is usually managed by an order management system (OMS), which is the central hub connecting order details with stock level, logistics, and customer communication tools. A modern OMS keeps everything in sync instead of relying on manual processes or disconnected systems, automatically triggering actions like payment capture and shipment tracking.
See how the Shipium Fulfillment Engine bridges the gap between your OMS and other systems to orchestrate orders better.
How your business moves orders from “buy now” to “delivered” impacts your bottom line. Case in point: according to the 2024 VML Future Shopper report, 63% of consumers want to move from inspiration to purchase as quickly as possible, and delivery speed remains one of the top factors influencing buying decisions.
Your ecommerce order management process flow helps you meet those expectations and drive better results across your entire operation. Here are the top benefits of a robust system – and why they matter for your business:
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Benefits of a solid ecommerce order management process |
How do these benefits impact your shipping operations |
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Improves customer satisfaction |
Customers trust brands that deliver reliably. Accurate, on-time fulfillment lowers return rates and increases repeat purchases. |
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Operational efficiency |
Efficient workflows give your team breathing room. They can process more orders without burning out staff, cutting corners, or letting errors slip through. |
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Provides end-to-end visibility and control |
When data flows cleanly between systems, logistics teams can proactively resolve issues, track orders accurately, and coordinate better with carriers. |
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Optimizes inventory and shipping spend |
Smarter inventory management reduces overstocking and stockouts, and fewer urgent shipments mean decreased shipping costs. |
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Supports omnichannel and complex supply chains |
Integrated fulfillment systems intelligently route orders across warehouses, stores, and 3PL partners, helping you deliver faster and adapt to customer expectations more easily. |
A transparent order management process helps your team stay coordinated, avoid delays, and deliver the right items at the right time. These are the seven steps of a modern ecommerce workflow:
The order-to-delivery process starts the moment a customer places an order, whether on your site, a marketplace, or through another channel. This step captures everything your systems need to move fast and accurately: product details, shipping information, and payment method.
Key considerations at this stage:
When a customer places an order, the OMS pulls in all the key details and moves the fulfillment process. It becomes the single source of truth, keeping inventory, payment, and buyer information synced across the systems your operation depends on.
Once all the details are captured in your order processing system:
Before an order can proceed, two critical checks happen behind the scenes: inventory availability and purchase authorization. Verifying both ensures that the right products are ready to ship — and that payment has been successfully secured.
During this step:
Shippers need to make quick, informed decisions about how to move orders most efficiently, like whether to consolidate shipments to reduce costs and maximize resources. Automated solutions like Shipium help operators make faster, more informed decisions by weighing real-time factors like cost, speed, and inventory availability, then routing each order through the most efficient path.
The picking and packing stage is where accuracy really counts. Warehouse teams (or automated systems) locate the right SKUs, verify quantities, and prep each order based on shipping needs, from packaging standards to carrier rules. It’s your last chance to make sure everything’s correct before the shipment heads out the door.
At this stage:
Learn how advanced cartonization software can help optimize your fulfillment process.
Once packing is done, the order moves to outbound operations. This is where labels are printed, tracking info is linked to the order, and the shipment gets prepped for pickup. Even small delays here can snowball into missed delivery promises, especially when volume spikes.
The package is then handed off to the carrier to fulfill the order, officially moving into transit and triggering customer notifications.
Discover how Carrier Selection helps enterprise shippers select the best shipping method, every time.
Once the carrier picks up the package, it’s out of your warehouse — but not entirely out of your hands. Meeting your delivery promises means more than getting a box from point A to point B; it means hitting timelines, providing real-time updates, and making the customer delivery experience feel as seamless as the purchase itself.
During final delivery, carriers:
The order journey doesn’t end at delivery. Handling returns, exchanges, and customer support quickly and efficiently is just as important as getting the original package out the door. For context, the National Retail Federation (NRF) projected the total returns for the retail industry to reach $890 billion in 2024. That number is not only massive but also 19.8% higher than the 2023 projection.
A smooth post-sales process protects customer satisfaction and helps turn one-time buyers into repeat customers.
Typical post-delivery activities might include:
Minor improvements in how you manage orders can unlock significant gains across fulfillment speed, customer satisfaction, and operational efficiency. Below are five smart ways to build a faster, more resilient workflow:
Integrating key platforms like your OMS and WMS gives your team a single, real-time view of inventory, orders, and customer data. Without it, seemingly small disconnects can quickly become delayed shipments and missed delivery guarantees.
To put this strategy into practice:
The Shipium platform, for example, centralizes all of your data — like fulfillment contexts, rules, contracts, analytics, and KPIs — into a single web console. This visibility makes it easier to adapt to changing conditions, optimize carrier selection, and stay in control without relying on external IT support.
Automating order status updates ensures customers stay informed throughout the parcel shipping process, without overloading your operations team. Manual updates can fall behind, driving unnecessary WISMO (“Where is my order?”) inquiries and customer frustration. According to Deloitte, intelligent automation can reduce organizational costs by up to 32%.
Here’s how to automate your process:
Building flexibility into your fulfillment network — such as ship-from-store, split shipments, or regional routing — lets you meet delivery windows more efficiently. Without flexible options, businesses risk higher shipping costs, missed timelines, and overreliance on single distribution points.
Stay flexible by:
Learn how distributed order management (DOM) systems make this possible by automatically selecting the best fulfillment path based on proximity, cost, and inventory.
Keeping inventory synced across all sales channels — ecommerce storefronts, marketplaces, retail locations — prevents overselling and costly fulfillment errors. Without synchronization, stockouts and backorders erode trust and lead to lost revenue.
How to stay aligned:
Connecting all your sales channels into a unified OMS workflow makes order fulfillment faster and more consistent. Without this insight, operators waste time juggling platforms, increasing processing errors, and slowing delivery.
To streamline your shipping process workflow:
Shipium helps enterprise operators make smarter, faster decisions by filling the gaps between existing systems. Whether you're trying to reduce split shipments, cut delivery costs, or improve on-time performance, our enterprise shipping platform brings the intelligence needed to optimize every fulfillment decision — in real time, enhancing the capabilities of your order management software.
Want to see how Shipium works? Book a demo and explore how smarter decisions can enhance your order management process flow.
Effective customer order management depends on having complete visibility across your entire operation. A centralized solution:
Order management shapes the delivery experience through accurate inventory availability, efficient routing, and transparent communication. When these measures fail, problems cascade. For example, a 2024 Deposco report found 47% of order management systems couldn't handle volume spikes, leading to missed delivery promises.
While often used interchangeably, order management and fulfillment services are vastly different functions in your ecommerce operations. Take a look at the key differences between these complementary processes:
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Key differences |
Order management flow |
Fulfillment process |
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Scope |
Orchestrates the entire order journey |
Executes the physical movement of products |
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Processing |
Handles payment processing and order validation |
Focuses on picking, packing, and shipping |
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Data handling |
Manages customer data and communications |
Organizes warehouse operations |
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Channel management |
Coordinates inventory across all channels |
Works within a single warehouse or location |
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Timeline |
Extends from purchase through post-sale support |
Ends when products leave the facility |