What to Look For: Striving to Make Every Customer's Wish Come True, Retailers Upgrade Order Management
Excerpted from
Striving to make every customer's wish come true, retailers upgrade order management
By Don Davis
Multi-channel retailers are under pressure to fulfill orders in customer-pleasing ways, whether that means a small retailer providing a FedEx tracking number or a big retail chain enabling customers to order online and pick up in the store. That pressure is creating growing demand for order management systems that let retailers satisfy every whim of the increasingly demanding cross-channel customer.
The good news for retailers is that order management systems have grown more powerful as e-commerce has grown, and vendors that provide them more financially stable. That gives Joe Hardiman, chief technology officer at Charming Interactive, the confidence to shop for a new e-commerce platform and order management system to replace the in-house technology that the e-commerce arm of retail chain Charming Shoppes Inc. has used for seven years.
A wide price range
With the wide variation in features comes a big range in prices. The entry-level version of Dydacomp's Mail Order Manager, for instance, starts at $1,000 for a one-seat license. But Hardiman figures that the industry average budget for putting together an e-commerce platform and order management system for a 1,500-store chain like his with multiple web sites is $8 million to $10 million, with implementation likely to take 18 to 24 months. He would not say how much Charming has allocated.
For most retailers, the cost of an order management system will fall in between.
The outsourcing decision
Once decisions about budget and outsourcing are made, each retailer must figure out which features are essential to its business.
In many cases, what's key is being able to integrate an order management system with another system. For Cowgirl Creamery, a cheesemaker that ships exclusively via FedEx, easy data exchange with FedEx was essential, says Maureen Cornelia, mail order and online sales manager.
The San Francisco-area company chose Mail Order Manager after several other food retailers told Cornelia they used the Dydacomp software. Just being able to easily provide a customer with a FedEx shipping number, rather than sifting through paper orders to find it, made the 2006 holiday season easier, Cornelia says.
Those efficiencies explain why more e-retailers are wishing for, and investing in, upgraded order management systems.
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