OMS & Marketplace, the new winning pair for retailers
For many retailers, 2020 and 2021 saw profound changes to their internal sales and procurement processes. Additionally, the store closures caused by the pandemic upended the buying experience.
Order Management Systems (OMS) took on a new dimension by becoming the cornerstone for sales transactions.
At the same time, the pandemic fostered the rise of new sales models with one standing above all the rest: the marketplace. As proof, according to a YouGov study for Stripe dated September 2021, 52% of French people say they prefer marketplaces in order to be able to shop in a centralized way. In the face of these two exponentially evolving variables, implementing an OMS/Marketplace is almost self-evident for retailers today. Read on to find out more.
The growing role of marketplaces
Over time, marketplaces have become a sales channel that can't be ignored. Its most significant advantage is that it has much lower marketing costs than other sales channels. How? By centralizing the buying space, marketplaces unify the marketing and communication vectors that merchants use.
Marketplaces are also a channel that opens up a possibility for retailers to go international. While opening up its market to the greatest number is a business opportunity for any brand, it must face the challenge of winning customers' trust and making itself known. Marketplaces help to overcome this obstacle. Given the number of third-party sellers on the web, marketplaces are becoming increasingly popular with customers by offering an easy, direct way to compare products and prices from a single, reliable source. In this quest to reinforce the trust between consumers and retailers, customers will always feel safer buying from the brand's marketplace than from some online store that they don't know.
Finally, being able to shop 24/7 was often just a dream for both sellers and consumers. Marketplaces remove any constraints of time or place from sellers while providing them with their own logistics services.
OMS: a driving role in marketplace management
The whole point of a marketplace is to communicate reliable information to customers about the products on sale. In this, OMSes have all the cards in hand to play a central role. But it doesn’t end there.
An OMS simultaneously exposes the stock to be sold on the marketplace. Retailers then have several strategies open to them: they can sell products initially present in-store (and ship them from the point of sale in a Ship From Store service), sell stock that is exclusive to marketplaces, or shift stock from previous seasons.
Integrating an OMS into the marketplace also helps to ensure that all orders placed online are shipped and received. It has an interface to verify that the customer promise of receiving their order on time and, especially, with the right delivery method can be fulfilled. An OMS also contributes to the customer experience, impacting the retailer's customer service by informing it of order statuses and cancellation rates.
From an internal perspective, an OMS makes stock shortage problems visible before and after an order, since it virtually segments stock so that it allows the seller to verify what it puts up for sale on each market. Furthermore, by "absorbing" the orders placed on the marketplace and updating the inventory in real time, the OMS prevents excess sales.
By making information more easily accessible to the seller, all these positive externalities inevitably result in higher margins and lower production costs. As a concrete example, an OMS can automatically choose the most affordable and most environmentally friendly delivery method according to the variables it receives.
As you can see, pairing a marketplace with an OMS offers significant gains in referencing and accessibility. This combination is fully in line with post-COVID buying behavior, allowing current and future sellers to acquire new customers, along with an undeniable increase in their turnover.