Fulfillment Has Moved Ahead. Have Your Order Management Capabilities?

See If Your OMS Still Fits

November 11, 2026
Manhattan Associates
Read time: 7 minutes

Key Takeaways

Every order is a promise. Keeping it consistently earns customer trust and repeat business.
Fulfillment problems often share one root cause: no single view of the order. That can show up as cancellations, padded delivery dates, split shipments, or “Where is my order?” calls.
Use existing metrics to assess your OMS. Cancellations, shipping and return costs, and order-related service contacts can reveal whether it still fits. If teams’ numbers disagree, the issue may be fragmented data, not system setup, signaling it’s time to evaluate modern order management.

Every order is a promise, and the retailers pulling ahead are the ones that keep it, order after order.

Customers now buy on the site, in the app, in stores and on marketplaces. They pick up in an hour, choose same-day delivery and return anywhere. Retailers fulfill from distribution centers, stores and suppliers in a single day's work. That flexibility is a real advantage, as long as every team sees the same order.

When they don't, the advantage turns into friction. A pickup order is cancelled because the store's count was hours old. A delivery date is padded by two days to be safe. A parcel ships from 900 miles away when a nearby store had the item. An agent can't say where an order is. E-commerce owns the cancellation. Stores own the missing unit. Fulfillment owns the parcel cost. Service owns the call. No one owns the order.

The stakes are clear. 74% of retail executives say delivering every order as promised builds consumer trust, and only one in three believe their organization consistently out-executes competitors on delivery (Retail CXO Outlook: Roadmap to 2030). Meanwhile, 71% of consumers say they are less likely to shop with a retailer again after a poor experience (NRF and Happy Returns, 2025). The distance between those numbers is where customers are won.

Many order management systems were chosen when most orders left one warehouse for one address. Peak season shows quickly whether yours has kept pace. Here's how to find out, and what to do next.

Where the promise is kept, or broken

The promise depends on six moments. In each one, separate views of the order create a gap, and one view closes it.

Inventory. When counts from stores, DCs and in-transit stock reach the website on different schedules, the site sells units that aren't there. With one accurate count across stores, DCs and in-transit, every unit is sellable from wherever it sits. Today, inventory accuracy in US specialty retail averages 67% (2026 Unified Commerce Benchmark, US), and IHL Group puts the global cost of out-of-stocks and overstocks at $1.73 trillion a year.
Promising. When delivery dates come from yesterday's data, or are a shot in the dark, teams add buffer days to protect them. Overly cautious estimates cost the sale at checkout, while overly ambitious promises disappoint customers, erode trust and generate more "where is my order?" inquiries. Dates calculated against live inventory and capacity are dates you can quote with confidence, and keep.
Sourcing and routing. When sourcing can't see store stock or cost to serve, orders split into extra parcels or cross the country. With the whole network in view, each order ships from the location that meets the date at the lowest cost. That matters: last-mile delivery is 57% of e-commerce fulfillment cost (2026 Unified Commerce Benchmark, US).
Exceptions. When a late, short or stuck order surfaces only after the customer calls, the promise is already broken. With one view, exceptions surface while there's still time to re-source the order.
Customer service. When agents check the order system, then the warehouse system, then the carrier site, every call runs long. Agents spend 28% of their workday switching between systems and re-entering data (Talkdesk, 2026). With one view, the agent sees the full order and resolves it on the first contact.
Self-service and returns. When the tracking page shows a different status than the agent sees, customers call anyway. With one view, customers track, change and return orders on their own terms, and every return goes where it will sell again. That's a sizable opportunity: shoppers were expected to send back nearly $850 billion in merchandise in 2025 (NRF and Happy Returns).

Poor order management is a symptom, not the disease. The cause is having no single view of the order. One version of the truth for inventory and orders turns each of these moments from a recurring problem into a reliable outcome.

It is also what AI needs. 91% of retail executives expect AI to be table stakes by 2030, but only 29% have built the data foundations to support it (Retail CXO Outlook). AI can't act with confidence when operational truth is fragmented.

The metrics that show whether your OMS still fits

You don't need a new data project to answer the question. Most of the evidence already sits in reports your teams run every week. Gather these numbers for the same recent month, ideally one with a promotion or peak weekend, and read them side by side.

Area	Metrics to gather	When it points to a new OMS
Inventory	Count accuracy by location; how often store counts update online	Store counts reach the website hours late, or online and store numbers can't be reconciled
Promising	Orders cancelled after checkout; days added to promise dates as buffer	Dates are padded by default because the system can't calculate them reliably
Sourcing and routing	Parcels per order; expedite spend; pickup and ship-from-store orders rejected for no stock	Sourcing can't see store inventory or cost to serve, so splits and expedites climb at peak
Cost to serve	Total shipping costs; total return shipping costs; margin per order after fulfillment costs	Shipping and return costs climb faster than sales, or margins shrink on orders that should be profitable
Exceptions	Share of late or stuck orders caught before the customer gets in touch	Most exceptions surface through customer contacts or late carrier scans
Customer service	Volume of contacts about orders and returns, including status checks, edits and cancellations; systems opened per contact	Agents need more than one system to answer, change or cancel an order
Self-service and returns	Self-service adoption; days from return to resale	Tracking pages don't match what agents see, or returns default to one location

Read the numbers together, not one at a time. A single weak metric usually points to a setting worth tuning. The stronger signal is disagreement. When e-commerce, stores and service report different versions of the same weekend, the answer lies in where the data lives, not how the system is configured. That's the moment to start evaluating modern order management.

Put a value on the opportunity, too: orders saved, shipping and expedite spend avoided, contacts prevented, returns resold at full price. The benchmark shows the upside. Unified commerce leaders grew revenue 2.8% a year against 1.3% for basic peers, and moving from basic to leading is worth about $25 million for every $1 billion in revenue (2026 Unified Commerce Benchmark, US). Only 7% of US specialty retailers have reached that level, which leaves plenty of room to move ahead.

Close the promise-delivery gap

When every team and every customer reads the same order, the work gets simpler. Inventory is visible everywhere. Sourcing is cost-efficient. Orchestration and routing meet the date. Service resolves the call the first time. Promises get easier to make and easier to keep, and every peak gets easier to plan for.

An order should be one thing, from the first click to the last return, with every system that touches it reading the same record. That's the foundation for staying ahead of what customers expect next.

Read the 2026 Unified Commerce Benchmark to see how your operation compares with 250 US specialty retailers. Then get the One Version of Truth eBook for a closer look at what one view of every order makes possible.

Sources

Incisiv. 2026 Unified Commerce Benchmark for Specialty Retail, US edition. Commissioned by Manhattan Associates. Assessment of 250 US specialty retailers, Q1 2026.
Incisiv and World Retail Congress. The Retail CXO Outlook: Roadmap to 2030. Commissioned by Manhattan Associates. Survey of 336 retail executives, Q1 2026.
Chain Store Age, 2025, reporting IHL Group. Modeled estimate of global retail losses.
NRF, October 2025. Surveys of 2,006 consumers and 358 e-commerce professionals; the $849.9 billion total is a full-year forecast.
Talkdesk, August 2026.