Harnessing Order Operations to Deliver the Modern Brand Promise
How OrderOps is Transforming Commerce by Supporting More Selling and Fulfillment Channels, While Unifying With Back Office Systems of Record
If you’ve noticed anything about the ecommerce industry in the first two months of this year, it’s that order orchestration is on everyone’s mind. More than just a short-lived trend, order orchestration is vital for brands seeking to manage growth without sacrificing speed, accuracy, or customer satisfaction. As selling channels multiply—from .com sites and marketplaces to social platforms like TikTok—many businesses realize that approaches that worked in the early 2000s, are struggling to keep pace with today’s rapid, ongoing changes.
A recent whitepaper from RMW Consulting underscores this reality, noting that 73% of retail consumers now use multiple channels to shop and that businesses see a 494% boost in order rate when they expand beyond two channels. Capitalizing on such opportunities requires a nimble, scalable way to manage orders, inventory updates, and fulfillment instructions. This is where a new approach known as OrderOps enters the picture.
The Modern Brand Promise
RMW Consulting’s whitepaper introduces the “Modern Brand Promise”—the idea of buying what you want, where you want and getting it when you want, every time. Delivering on that promise hinges on delivering accurate product details, real-time order updates, and flawless fulfillment follow-through across any channel. If that sounds like a tall order, it is—and delays or errors can quickly erode shopper’s trust.
When a brand can’t sync its .com, app, marketplaces, brick-and-mortars, and fulfillment channels quickly enough, shoppers may see items listed as in-stock that are actually sold out, or vice versa, resulting in the dreaded and brand-damaging over-sell. Delays and over-sells erode trust and can drive customers toward competitors with faster shipping or more reliable availability. As Jon Gettinger, CMO of Pipe17 puts it, “If the item you want is available from places A, B, and C at the same price, you’re going to go where you can get your products fastest.”
From Traditional Approaches to OrderOps
Traditional order management systems (OMSs) were designed for large, store-based retailers, and historically the choice was between that or an ERP to handle real-time ecommerce orders. As shifting market realities put greater pressure on order orchestration, this dichotomy of OMS and ERP is proving cumbersome for brands that run multiple digital channels and need to respond quickly to market changes.
Many modern, cloud-based OMS offerings are now more composable and better suited to ecommerce realities, but for certain businesses they can still feel like too hefty an option.
“A $200 million digitally native brand doesn’t need to buy an OMS,” Gettinger observes. It’s simply beyond the scope of requirement. That’s where OrderOps comes in.
In parallel with the emergence of new, more flexible OMS offerings, a different concept known as OrderOps has gained traction. Much like DevOps dissolved barriers between development and IT operations, and RevOps unified revenue-focused teams, OrderOps breaks down the silos separating sales and customer channels, fulfillment partners, and back-office systems.
A Network-Based Orchestration Platform
Kelly Goetsch, COO at Pipe17, points to a core obstacle in modern commerce: “When we really started looking at the problem, we had one big insight: connecting things and dealing with data flows between systems was the fundamental problem to solve.” An increasingly popular solution is a network-based orchestration platform that normalizes and routes order data among various “nodes”—sales channels, 3PLs, ERPs, WMSs, or even analytics tools.
Instead of building a web of fragile point-to-point connections, as with a traditional Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), the orchestration platform leverages a canonical data model—essentially a master schema that defines interoperability between applications—to keep each node in sync. This arrangement not only streamlines adding or swapping channels and fulfillment partners, but also reduces the so-called “node squared problem,” where each node must be connected to every other node. The order operations connectivity layer acts as a single source of truth for real-time updates, ensuring product availability and order statuses are consistent across every platform.
Achieving the Modern Brand Promise
By using a hub-and-spoke connectivity model, brands can more easily unify and automate core processes such as inventory synchronization, real-time order and return tracking, and advanced routing rules. Instead of customizing multiple integrations one by one, teams manage a central “connectivity layer” that updates every node in the network with order-related data.
The RMW Consulting whitepaper argues that a well-implemented order operations (or OrderOps) strategy can yield faster channel expansion, accurate delivery updates for consumers, and the agility to pivot quickly if a 3PL or marketplace partner changes its requirements. This approach parallels the DevOps principle of continuous, automated workflows that let teams adapt at the speed of market demand.
Some companies try building a custom solution on an iPaaS. While powerful, iPaaS tools can become unwieldy if you need commerce-specific logic for bundling, returns, or partial shipments. Others stick with a traditional OMS and discover that adding each new carrier or channel requires more coding or configuration than they’d like. Many brands thus favor dedicated OrderOps platforms featuring built-in ecommerce logic, real-time data sync, and routing automation— often with minimal reliance on IT.
Increasingly, these solutions also integrate AI-driven tools to help configure routing rules or transform data with simple prompts, empowering operations teams to make changes themselves instead of waiting on developers. It’s a shift that moves away from purely developer-driven integrations and further democratizes order management.
Balancing Tradition and Innovation
Although a modernized OMS remains a strong backbone for certain enterprises—particularly those with extensive stores—purely digital or rapidly growing brands may need more flexible orchestration to keep up with multi-channel dynamics. In either scenario, the common denominator is the need for near real-time data sync, minimal friction in adding or swapping nodes, and robust self-service functionality.
“When we talk about delivering the Modern Brand Promise,” Goetsch says, “we’re really talking about connecting everything so businesses don’t lose momentum with each new sales channel or fulfillment partnership.” That might mean linking up a TikTok Shop in a matter of days, swapping a 3PL provider with minimal downtime, or simply ensuring that every system sees the same real-time inventory levels.
Looking Ahead
Retail and ecommerce will continue to expand across new platforms and frontiers, challenging existing operational models. Order Operations, or OrderOps, promises to unify siloed data, streamline fulfillment, and give brands genuine operational agility without forcing them into an all-or-nothing approach. For some, a robust, cloud-based OMS is exactly the right fit. For others, a dedicated orchestration platform that handles connectivity, data normalization, and advanced routing—often enhanced by AI—may be the key to delivering on consumer expectations for speed and accuracy.
No matter the technological approach, the objective remains clear: ensuring that all stakeholders—sales, finance, fulfillment, and customer service—operate from a shared, accurate view of order and inventory data. Effective order operations prioritize seamless connectivity across the entire ecosystem. By streamlining visibility and automation, brands can eliminate data silos, reduce inefficiencies, and ultimately deliver the smooth, reliable service that today’s consumers expect.
Leigh Bryant
Editorial Director, Composable.com
Leigh Bryant is a seasoned content and brand strategist with over a decade of experience in digital storytelling. Starting in retail before shifting to the technology space, she has spent the past ten years crafting compelling narratives as a writer, editor, and strategist.