The best order management system for Shopify Plus retailers with stores

Do Shopify Plus brands actually need a separate OMS?

 If you run one warehouse and ship everything from it, probably not. Shopify handles that well. The question changes the day you open your third shop, add a 3PL in Europe, or start selling wholesale alongside direct.

Shopify Plus supports up to 200 locations, and it comes with a set of order routing rules: minimise split fulfilments, keep orders within the customer's market, ship from the closest location, or follow a ranked list of locations you set yourself. For a lot of brands that is a perfectly good start.

Shopify's own documentation is honest about where it stops. Order routing does not prevent overselling. "Closest location" is measured in a straight line, not by road, courier cut-off or store opening hours. When a customer's address cannot be matched to coordinates, which Shopify notes is more common outside the United States, the closest location rule is skipped and your oldest location is used instead. And custom routing logic is still in early access, available to merchants only through Shopify's Partner programme. 

None of that is a criticism of Shopify. It is a description of a job that sits one layer below the storefront, and that job gets harder with every location you add. 

The three kinds of OMS you will be offered

Once you start looking, the market splits into three camps. Each one is right for somebody. The trick is knowing which camp you are in before a sales team decides for you. 

The enterprise suites are serious software. They were also designed for retailers who rebuild their stack around the OMS, with a systems integrator on retainer to keep it that way. If you have already chosen Shopify Plus as your commerce platform, buying a second platform to sit on top of it is often the most expensive way to solve a routing problem.

Six things to check before you sign

1. Live stock from every location, including the ERP
Ask how often stock is updated and from where. If the answer involves a nightly sync or a CSV, every routing decision is a guess. You want one live figure per SKU per location, reconciled against your ERP, visible on the product page as well as in the back office. 

2. Routing rules you control without a developer
You should be able to say "fulfil from stores first in London, from the warehouse everywhere else, never from the flagship in December" and have it running the same afternoon. If every rule change needs a ticket, you have bought a project, not a tool.

3. Shopify POS and checkout stay where they are
Your store teams already know Shopify POS. Your conversion rate already depends on Shopify checkout. Anything that asks you to replace either deserves a very good reason.

4. Store fulfilment is built in, not bolted on
Click and collect, ship from store and same-day delivery are the reasons most retailers buy an OMS in the first place. They should be modules you switch on, with live stock behind them, not three separate apps that disagree with each other.

5. It works alongside NetSuite or your existing ERP
Your ERP is the financial system of record. The orchestration layer decides where orders go. Those are different jobs, and a good OMS respects the line between them instead of asking you to move it.

6. You pay for what you use
Ask for pricing that is tied to the modules you run. A licence for capabilities you will not touch for two years is shelfware with a renewal date. 

The question that often gets missed in the demo

Every demo shows a perfect order flowing from checkout to dispatch. Ask instead what happens when it goes wrong: the store marks the item out of stock after the order has been routed, the courier misses the collection, the customer changes the address. In a multi-location business those exceptions are not rare. They are the daily workload. This is where AI earns its place, provided it sits inside the platform rather than on top of it. RANDEM-ED, the AI layer inside RANDEMRETAIL, reroutes exceptions, checks stock and updates order statuses directly against live data, without a person stitching three screens together.

Where RANDEMRETAIL fits

We built RANDEMRETAIL because we kept watching Shopify brands with physical store locations being told that the only grown-up answer was an enterprise programme measured in quarters. We did not think that was true, and our clients have proved it is not.

RANDEMRETAIL is an e-commerce orchestration platform built natively on Shopify and BigCommerce as well as other e-commerce platforms. It keeps Shopify checkout and POS in place, sits alongside your ERP, and lets you switch on what you need: click and collect, ship from store, same-day delivery through Uber Direct and Roadie, a carrier module for the accounts you already hold, returns and subscriptions. Every order goes to whichever owned location actually has the stock.

SKIMS, Cass Art, Big R and Feeders Supply run on it today. When The Bike Shop moved five stores from BigCommerce to Shopify Plus, its order flows came across without rebuilding a single integration. Most clients are live in weeks, not quarters. 

Want to see how your stores would route orders?

 We will map your locations, stock and fulfilment rules on a 20 minute call and show you RANDEM-ED handling them live
 

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