Retail and direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands are facing tough choices. With budgets under pressure and dozens of competing priorities, such as ERP upgrades, search and personalization projects, loyalty platforms and more, how do you decide what deserves investment first?
It’s tempting to chase front-end sparkle or modernize back-office systems. But there’s one project that sits at the heart of customer experience and financial performance: order management. Specifically, a modern, distributed order management system (OMS) like Fluent Order Management.
Here’s why an OMS should move to the top of your project list.
1. OMS Impacts Every Dollar of Revenue
An ERP upgrade may promise cleaner financial reporting. A new search tool may improve site conversion. But only an OMS touches every order, every customer, every day.
Think about it: without an accurate, real-time order and inventory engine, you risk overpromising, underdelivering, and disappointing, or possibly losing customers. Fluent Order Management ensures the experience doesn’t break after “add to cart.”
That makes it not an IT project, but a revenue-critical system.
2. OMS Turns AI Into ROI
AI is everywhere in retail right now. Search vendors promise AI-powered discovery. Loyalty platforms talk about AI-driven personalization. But without accurate, real-time order and inventory data, AI is just guessing.
Fluent Order Management provides the clean, event-driven order data that AI needs to make profitable decisions, such as:
- Which location should fulfill the order
- How to decrease split shipments
- Providing customers with an accurate promise at checkout
A modern OMS is your foundation layer for AI. If you invest in AI before OMS, you’re building on sand.
3. OMS Delivers ROI Faster Than ERP
ERP projects are notorious for their size, cost, and timelines, often stretching 18 to 36 months, with little measurable ROI until the end.
Fluent Order Management is composable and cloud-native. That means retailers can be live in as little as 8 weeks, with direct, measurable outcomes:
- Reduced shipping costs through smarter sourcing
- Fewer cancellations thanks to real-time inventory visibility
- Lower customer service costs by giving shoppers accurate “where is my order” (WISMO) updates
In other words: ERP modernization may be necessary someday, but an OMS gives you a faster, lower-risk win.
4. OMS Directly Improves Margin
Search, loyalty, and personalization all claim to drive revenue. But they don’t fix the structural problems in fulfillment that destroy margin. A modern, distributed OMS will:
- Reduce split shipments, saving 2 to 5 percent of margin per order
- Increase inventory utilization, freeing up working capital
- Improve delivery promise accuracy, giving your brand a higher NPS and repeat purchases
These are board-level metrics, not just vanity KPIs. That’s how the right OMS shifts from a “systems project” to a P&L lever.
5. OMS Is the Hub of the Retail Stack
Most retailers run between 5 and 30 different systems, commerce platforms, marketplaces, payment gateways, WMS, tax engines, and loyalty programs. Without a strong OMS in the middle, integrations become brittle and costly.
Fluent Order Management’s event-driven architecture makes it the integration hub. It’s faster to connect to your other systems than an ERP. Much more critical to a positive customer experience than search. And allows you to future-proof by adding AI agents to optimize operations.
OMS isn’t another box on the diagram, it’s the connective tissue that makes the whole stack work seamlessly.
6. OMS Reduces Project Risk Everywhere Else
When retailers put an OMS project last, other projects suffer:
- Commerce search promises better conversion but disappoints when customers abandon at checkout because delivery dates are wrong
- Loyalty platforms can’t keep customers coming back if orders arrive late
- ERP modernization runs into scope creep if fulfillment logic hasn’t been modernized first
By modernizing your OMS first, you reduce risk and increase the impact of every other project in your portfolio.
7. OMS Future-Proofs Your Business
Retail is changing fast. AI agents will soon negotiate with carriers, predict safety stock, and dynamically adjust promises. That’s only possible if your OMS can act as a real-time decision engine.
Fluent Order Management is designed for this future.
- Event-driven to handle real-time data
- Composable to easily and quickly plug into new systems as they emerge
- Scalable to grow as your channels and order volumes expand
ERP upgrades and search projects might solve today’s problems. But an OMS prepares you for tomorrow.
The Time to Invest in OMS is Now
Retailers don’t have the luxury of chasing every project. Prioritization matters. And when you weigh the options, OMS consistently rises to the top:
- It impacts every dollar of revenue
- It delivers measurable ROI faster than an ERP
- It improves margin in ways search and loyalty can’t
- It reduces risk for every other project
- And it sets the foundation for AI-driven retail
Fluent Order Management isn’t just another system. It’s the platform that makes every other investment more valuable.
So the real question isn’t whether you can afford to prioritize OMS, it’s whether you can afford not to. If you want to learn more about how Fluent Order Management can help your business, contact us today.
