Q: What’s your advice for a multi-store retailer who’s looking to replace their legacy retail management software?

A: Your customers expect an omnichannel experience – the ability to browse all channels, including retail, website, and mobile. Often, legacy systems have difficulty scaling. Most of these legacy systems possess limited and restrictive integration methods; as a result, they strain to support the complexity and variety of products and channels. Consequently, legacy technology may cause a company to lose ground in the marketplace.

With today’s cloud-based, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings, there has never been a better time to replace outdated legacy systems with an advanced, affordable, and flexible distributed order management (DOM) software. Whether you’re a single or multi-outlet store, cloud solutions allow automation of a range of processes that legacy systems often cannot.

With a distributed order management system, a retailer can consolidate orders across multiple sales channels and optimize fulfillment operations. Thus, the distributed order management system becomes a vital hub between order acceptance and order fulfillment that can enable complex distribution strategies. Multi-store retailers can now view the status of their entire inventory, ordering, and shipping operations in real time, providing ease of tracking and enhanced customer service.

A cloud-based inventory solution can easily integrate with a host of other SaaS platforms, allowing for enhanced specialization. Accounting software, e-commerce website, and point-of-sale systems can all seamlessly talk to one another, drastically reducing the number of hours spent on manual data entry from day-to-day operations. By ensuring all critical data is available in real time, integration can increase sales and improve customer service.

SaaS, cloud-based distributed order management software is quick and affordable to set up and extremely flexible. Additionally, it allows a reduction in information technology costs and the resources needed to manage software, hardware, servers, integrations, and data backups. Lastly, by deploying a cloud-based distributed order management software such as SalesWarp, restrictions are eliminated. This means confidently keeping up with order volumes and meeting customer demands, even during the holiday season.