Don’t let order management overshadow sales, marketing, retailers say
Like everything else it touches, the web has dramatically increased the complexity of order management, retailers report. Catalogers have understood the need for order management for years, but they usually had the benefit of call center reps to straighten out any problems before the order entered the system. Not so with the web, where customers are entering their own order information.
“I thought all we needed an order management system for was to track the orders and do the financial processing,” Michael Sutton, president of school uniform seller FrenchToast.com LLC, which went online in 1998, tells Internet Retailer. “I initially thought, What’s the big deal?”
FrenchToast.com quickly learned what the big deal was: “I didn’t understand the frequency and complexity of exceptions,” Sutton says. “20% of orders require an inordinate amount of our time.”
Sutton says retailers need to be careful not to get sidetracked by issues such as order management, which outsourced vendors often can perform more efficiently than retailers. FrenchToast turned to automated order management on an outsourced basis from NewRoads Inc. “We were focusing so much on servicing customers’ needs in picking, packing and shipping and on order management that we weren’t able to spend as much time on sales and marketing,” Sutton says. “That led us to outsourcing some of those functions.”
That decision left time for the things that retailers do well, he says. “We know school uniforms and that’s what we wanted to focus on,” Sutton says. “We’re leveraging the expertise of the people and the systems at NewRoads.”
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