Adobe announces new partnerships to meet growing customer demand in order management

2020 was unlike any other year for all of us, and revolutionary for the e-commerce industry. The COVID-19 pandemic forced consumers and businesses to quickly adapt to new and innovative ways of purchasing and delivering products. Customer behavior, preferences, and expectations shifted rapidly — and now buyers have come to expect accurate estimates of when products will be delivered, regardless of where and when a transaction was placed.

According to data from Adobe’s 2020 Holiday Shopping Season report, last year’s holiday season saw two years’ worth of growth, an increase of 32 percent YoY, bringing new opportunities, challenges, and complexities to all merchants. The importance of meeting customer expectations like shipping deadlines or offering more convenient ways to fulfill products, like buy-online pickup-in-store (“BOPIS”) became paramount to business success. Businesses of varying sizes and different industries came to the realization that homegrown Order Management Systems (OMS) were not agile enough to adapt to these new market demands. In the midst of spiking demand and compressed timelines, merchants increasingly looked for a greater choice of turnkey solutions to support the unprecedented shift to digital shopping.

The many shifts in regional mandates and guidelines in response to the pandemic added further complexity to omnichannel requirements and the challenges that sellers face to meet ever-changing consumer preferences — all while maximizing resources and reducing operational costs. But, as Forrester states, “An OMS is just one piece of the omnichannel puzzle… to drive a successful omnichannel retail experience, digital business professionals must develop a coordinated portfolio of technology services that work in tandem, which includes POS and the e-commerce platform.”

To better serve the varied needs of Adobe merchants, and to simplify the process of connecting two pieces of the e-commerce success puzzle, we are excited to announce two new OMS offerings that will soon be available to all Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source  customers. Adobe has partnered with two leaders in the OMS space, IBM (IBM Sterling® Order Management) and Fluent Commerce (Fluent Order Management) to facilitate an integration between their solutions and Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source.

These partner-led integrations will facilitate the connection between Adobe Commerce and our partners’ solutions, allowing merchants to easily keep track of inventory, order status, and shipping information. Moreover, we understand the importance of having a modern architecture that is easy to integrate while allowing for maximum flexibility and scalability. With a forecast growth of 14.7 percent compound annual growth rate compared to a 2.1 percent decline for on-prem applications, cloud-based OMS applications offer the advantages of both worlds. Not only do they allow merchants to reduce implementation costs and downtime, but they also better position customers to compete in the years to come. Therefore, we selected partners with cloud-native solutions that focus on extensibility and allow for further customization to meet our customers’ specific needs and use cases.

Both IBM’s and Fluent Commerce’s feature-rich and robust applications will not only offer merchants a global footprint, but will also enable businesses of all sizes, industries, and business models to have an OMS solution that best meets their needs.
Together, these partnerships build on and extend the capabilities that customers have had with Magento Order Management. With a proven track record and years of experience developing and enhancing their offerings, Fluent and IBM have demonstrated their ability to adapt to today’s ever-changing market conditions and to provide a wide range of capabilities to suit the varied needs of Adobe merchants. We are extremely excited about the countless benefits the synergy between Adobe Commerce and our partners’ solutions will bring to all our customers.

To learn more about these partners, their products, and the way they integrate with Adobe Commerce, please reach out to your account executive or visit our partners’ websites: Fluent Commerce and IBM.

Please note that use of either OMS solution will require you to enter into a separate agreement with the OMS provider of your choice.