Is Shopify an order management system?

M Ryan M Ryan

Shopify is an ecommerce platform, a tool that a business can use to build its online store. Shopify is also the name of the Canadian company that has built and provides this tool to merchants worldwide for a fee.

Read More : What exactly does Shopify do?

Shopify provides some of the functionality of an ecommerce order management system (OMS) tightly integrated into the ecommerce platform. For example, a merchant using Shopify can see a list of orders placed by customers, print carrier labels for picked orders and print dispatch documentation.

However a standalone OMS does much more. It can be used to collect, manage and process orders from multiple sources - your web store and mobile App, a marketplace such as Amazon, manually entered by a customer services representative or input by a store colleague in the physical, brick and mortar store. A dedicated OMS can also route orders to multiple fulfillment points - warehouses, suppliers and retail stores - and make decisions on how to route an order based on the availability of inventory, shipping services and cost to fulfill the order.

Read More : eCommerce Order Management Key Processes

Read More : eCommerce Order Management Systems

Shopify does not provide an OMS to manage a complex ecommerce business with multiple sales channels and fulfillment nodes. However, it does run its "Shopify app store" that provides a marketplace of third party solutions that can be integrated into the Shopify ecommerce platform. This marketplace's list of order management systems included 119 solutions at the time of writing, making selection of an OMS a particularly challenging task for a Shopify merchant. Many of these offer a free plan for limited functionality, or a 7 or 14 day trial for new users, some include hundreds of customer reviews, but a word of caution many of these solutions are not truly order management systems, rather inventory management, or marketplace feed management solutions that do not deliver all of the features required by enterprise ecommerce order management processes.

Once a business goes beyond these cheap and cheerful, freemium style OMS solutions, consider the enterprise solutions, as described in our article eCommerce Order Management Systems.

This article was updated on March 6, 2021

M Ryan

M Ryan is an ecommerce consultant with twenty years experience working with retailers, consumer brand manufacturers and other consumer-facing businesses helping them to develop their ecommerce strategy, implement ecommerce technology and improve their ecommerce operations. He works extensively throughout US and Europe, with clients including global brands, large retailers and household names in consumer goods.

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