Ernie Schell

An order management system is a critical resource for omnichannel retailers who sell merchandise that they ship from either their own warehouse or via a third-party service bureau or logistics provider. To take full advantage of all their benefits, however, you need to make a strategic decision about which OMS is right for your organization. Here are some tips to help with that process. 

A best practices guide to transitioning to a new e-commerce platform.

In part 1 of this two-part series from our August issue, we classified e-commerce systems into four essential groups: bundled suites, enterprise leaders, niche players and experienced multichannel partners.

Until recently, selecting the optimum e-commerce platform for a multichannel business was a race to keep up with evolving technologies. The applications morphed at such blinding speed that the needs and requirements you defined when selecting your system easily could be obsolete by the time that system was up and running. Today's technology isn't evolving any slower — if anything, the pace of e-commerce change continues to accelerate. But the main differentiators among systems these days are less in the features and functions they support than the services they offer, flexibility, scalability, technical support, and the vendors' approach to charging for licenses or services. In short, your biggest challenge in selecting a platform may be determining which provider will be your best business partner going forward.

By Ernie Schell What is "software?" The easy answer is a computer program designed to execute one or more specified functions. But in 2006, the reality is that there is no easy answer. Over the past five years, there's been a revolution in the so-called "software as a service" (SaaS) arena. This is something of a throwback to the 1970s and before, when a centralized mainframe served selected views of software programs to a user's "dumb terminal." The terminals were "dumb" because they did no computing. You entered data into the interface and the mainframe did the

How your operations and marketing efforts can benefit from statistical analysis and modeling. Forgive me if I generalize for a minute. There are two approaches to marketing analysis: the arithmetic and the statistical. The Arithmetic Approach Sometimes called “descriptive analytics,” this is relatively straightforward and inexpensive, depending on a spreadsheet and the sweat of your brow. Extracting a season’s sales from your transaction system to your spreadsheet, you can determine the following: - percent response, by dividing your number of orders by your mail quantity per segment; - average order value, by dividing your gross sales by your number of orders per segment; -

“Data, data everywhere” could be the cry of the merchant who selects a Web Analytics solution without understanding the commitment it requires from technical, marketing, merchandising and other staff. The same lament might come from selecting a solution that’s not optimized for e-commerce or for a user’s special needs related to Web site optimization. In the long run, it’s better to have realistic expectations of what you want to use a Web Analytics solution for. Like many companies, Gardener’s Supply tried several Web Analytics solutions before settling on its current application: Omniture. But the merchant’s experience taught it to be realistic about how

When catalog order management systems were first developed in the 1970s, they were designed to manage all aspects of catalog operations: from order entry, customer service and customer database management to response analysis, inventory management, purchasing, fulfillment, and returns. Thirty years later, they still are, which is why so many direct merchants can run their businesses on these applications without a need to add specialized solutions for things like warehouse management. Some companies, however, find their catalog management systems don’t provide the flexibility or sophistication they need to address their inventory or fulfillment challenges. For them, a warehouse management system (WMS) is a necessary

Merchandise forecasting systems exist in a world unto themselves. And yet they’re basic tools that any mid-to-large-sized cataloger needs to compete successfully. Still, few catalog executives choose to make the investment in such solutions. In most cases, this reluctance is caused by two factors. On the one hand, no one in the company may “own” the issue of making strategic inventory decisions. Merchants may make product selections, buyers decide whom to purchase from, marketers determine price points, and inventory managers must find a place to store the items or arrange for drop shipment. Yet no one takes full responsibility for determining exactly how

Selecting and implementing a new order management system can be a daunting process. After all, this is a mission-critical suite of applications that can make or break your business. There are dozens of potential solutions and never enough time — or so it seems — to attend to all the details. There’s also the issue of technophobia. And sorting out the real from the hype in your technology options is unquestionably a tough challenge, even if you’re trying to keep up with the changes in this fast-paced field. Often the best way to achieve a successful outcome is to learn from the