An order management system is the software that takes an order from the moment a customer places it to the moment it is delivered and invoiced — tracking stock, picking a fulfilment location, routing the order to a warehouse or a 3PL, and keeping the customer informed along the way. For most Australian wholesalers, distributors and online sellers, the honest answer is that you do not need a standalone order management system. You need one system that holds orders, inventory and accounting together. Odoo does that natively. A few situations deserve a closer look, and this guide covers how to tell whether you are in one.
We implement Odoo for Australian wholesalers, distributors, manufacturers and retailers, so we see the same pattern most weeks: a business running three or four basic tools that each hold part of the order, with a person in the middle re-typing data between them. That person is the order management system. This guide covers what the software actually does, the order management process end to end, how it works in Odoo, and when it is worth talking through whether you need more.
What is an order management system?
An order management system (often shortened to OMS) is a central place where every order lands, whatever channel it came from, and where it is tracked through to delivery. Instead of orders sitting in an inbox, a spreadsheet, a phone message and a webshop admin panel, a centralised order management system holds them all in one queue with one status each.
The important word is centralised. A business selling through a website, a sales rep, a trade counter and a marketplace has four sets of order data. Without a single system, nobody can answer "what have we sold today and can we ship it?" without opening four screens and doing mental arithmetic. Order management software exists to collapse that into one view.
An OMS is not the same thing as accounting software, and it is not a warehouse system. It sits between them: it owns the order, tells the warehouse what to pick, and tells the accounting ledger what to invoice.
What does an order management system actually do?
Strip away the vendor language and order management software does six jobs.
Captures orders from multiple sales channels. Website, online marketplaces, EDI from a major retailer, a rep's tablet, in store at a trade counter, email, phone. Orders from multiple channels each become the same kind of record, which is what makes an order management solution different from a shared inbox.
Checks inventory availability in real time. Before accepting an order, the system looks at real time inventory across multiple warehouses and retail locations, so you are not selling stock you do not have.
Decides where the order ships from. This is order routing. With one warehouse it is trivial. With multiple fulfilment locations, a third party logistics provider and the option to ship from store, automated routing by proximity, stock levels or shipping costs is where real money is saved.
Drives the fulfilment process. It passes picking instructions to the warehouse, books the consignment with shipping carriers, and records what actually left.
Keeps customers informed. Order confirmation, dispatch notice, tracking link. Most customer service load on orders is people asking where their order is; letting them track orders themselves removes it, and a positive customer experience after the sale is mostly just telling people what is happening.
Hands clean data to accounting and reporting. Invoice raised from the order, not re-keyed. Margin visible per order, per channel, per customer.
If your current setup does all six without manual processes in between, you already have an order management system, whatever it is called.
What are the four stages of order management?
Most descriptions of the order management process break it into four stages, and it is a useful frame because each stage is where a different thing goes wrong.
- Order capture. The customer places an order and it becomes a record. Failure mode: orders arriving in formats nobody owns — a voicemail, a text to a rep, a PDF purchase order.
- Order processing. Credit check, pricing, stock allocation, approval. Failure mode: a day of delay while someone confirms whether the price on the order is the price you agreed.
- Fulfilment. Pick, pack, dispatch, deliver. Failure mode: picking errors and shipping delays that you only discover when the customer calls.
- Post-order. Invoice, payment, returns, credits, reporting. Failure mode: invoices that do not match what shipped.
A system that only fixes stage one — a tidier order form — rarely changes the business. The gains come from stages two and three, where the manual work is.
What happens when order management goes wrong?
Worth being concrete about this, because the cost is usually invisible until you add it up.
You sell stock you do not have. Without real time visibility across locations, two channels sell the same unit. Someone has to ring a customer and explain. This is the single most common consequence of not syncing inventory between systems.
Orders sit waiting on a person. An order arrives on a channel nobody checks hourly, and the clock on the customer's expectations starts anyway. Customers expect dispatch confirmation within a day; a queue that is only worked at 4pm turns a same-day order into a two-day order.
Your customer service team becomes the tracking system. When customers cannot see where their order is, they ask. Every "where is my order" call is a staff cost caused by missing information, not by a difficult customer.
Shipping delays surface late. A picking error or a missed consignment is discovered when the customer complains rather than when it happens, which converts a fixable problem into customer dissatisfaction.
Nobody trusts the numbers. When order data and inventory data disagree, people stop using reports and start asking each other. Decisions slow down.
None of these show up as a line item. They show up as an operations manager who is permanently busy, and as customer satisfaction that quietly declines while order volume grows.
What is the difference between an OMS, a WMS and an ERP?
These three get used interchangeably by vendors, and the distinction matters when you are deciding what to buy.
An order management system owns the order. What was sold, to whom, at what price, where it ships from, what it costs you.
A warehouse management system owns the four walls. Where stock physically sits, how pickers move, bin locations, barcode scanning, cycle counts. Warehouse operations, not commercial terms. We have written separately on when a warehouse management system is worth it in Australia.
An ERP owns the whole business. Orders, inventory, warehouse, purchasing, manufacturing, accounting, payroll, projects, CRM — one database.
The practical consequence: if you buy a standalone OMS, you still need accounting tools and probably an inventory system, and you now own the integrations between them. If you implement an ERP with order management built in, the integration problem largely disappears, because the order and the inventory data are in the same database. That is the central trade-off, and it is why the right answer for most mid-sized Australian businesses is the second one.
Do you need an order management system, or better use of the one you have?
Before you buy a new system, it is worth checking which problem you actually have. Three different situations look identical from the outside.
Situation one: you have no system. Orders live in email and a spreadsheet. Inventory is a second spreadsheet that is updated weekly. This business needs software, and almost any decent option beats what it has.
Situation two: you have software that has hit a ceiling. Common in Australia: a business on Xero plus a webshop plus an inventory add-on. Each tool is fine; the joins are not. Orders are entered twice, inventory data disagrees between systems, and monthly order limits on a plan start to bite. This business does not need a fourth tool. It needs fewer tools.
Situation three: you have good software, badly configured. The capability is there and nobody turned it on. We find this more often than vendors admit — a business paying for a platform that could route orders automatically, doing it by hand because the rules were never set up.
Situations two and three are the majority. Both are cheaper to fix than a new platform, and if you are in situation three, a new system will reproduce the same problem with a different logo.
How does order management work in Odoo?
Odoo does not sell a product called "the OMS". Order management in Odoo is what you get when Sales, Inventory, Purchase, eCommerce and Accounting are switched on together, which is also why it tends to be cheaper than assembling the equivalent.
Orders arrive from every channel into the same sales order list. The Odoo webshop writes orders directly. A rep raises a quotation on a tablet that becomes an order on confirmation. Marketplace and EDI orders come in through connectors or the API. One queue, one status field.
Stock is checked against real inventory as the order is raised. Because Odoo Inventory is the same database as Odoo Sales, inventory visibility is not a sync that runs every fifteen minutes. The available quantity on the order line is the available quantity.
Delivery orders generate automatically, and routing rules decide where from. Odoo's routes and putaway rules handle multiple warehouses, cross-docking, drop-shipping from a supplier, and backorders. We cover the inventory side of this in detail in our guide to inventory management software for Australian businesses.
Replenishment is driven by actual demand. Reordering rules and forecasted quantities turn order volume into purchase orders, which is where the simple demand forecasting most distributors need actually lives.
The invoice comes from the order. No re-keying, and GST and BAS handled in the same ledger.
The whole order lifecycle sits in one record. Quotation, confirmation, delivery, invoice, payment and any return hang off the same order, so the order workflows your team follows are visible rather than tribal knowledge.
It reports as one business. Margin by channel, by product, by customer, from one source, because there is only one source. That also makes it possible to track success properly after go-live — order cycle time, backorder rate, fulfilment accuracy — instead of guessing.
Adding new sales channels later is configuration rather than a new integration project, which matters if online marketplaces or a second webshop are on your two-year plan.
For a wholesaler, that combination is usually the whole requirement. Our wholesale and distribution guide goes through the trade-specific parts — price lists per customer, backorders, EDI into the major retailers.
Not Sure If Odoo is Right For Your Business?
Not sure if Odoo is right for your business?
What is the best order management software for an Australian business?
There is no single best order management system, and any article that gives you one without asking about your channels is selling something. There are four categories, and the useful question is which category you are in.
Platform-native order management. If you sell on one platform and only that platform, the platform's own order tools may be enough. Cheapest option, and the ceiling arrives the moment you add a second channel.
Inventory-and-order tools. Products like Zoho Inventory and similar mid-market tools sit on top of accounting software and add order and inventory management, including inventory tracking across a couple of locations. They work well for a single-channel online seller, and paid plans start low. The limitation is that you are now running two systems and reconciling them, and choosing the right order management software here means checking how it syncs inventory rather than comparing feature lists.
ERP with order management included. Odoo, NetSuite, MYOB Acumatica and the Microsoft Dynamics family. One database for orders, stock and accounts. Higher implementation effort, much lower ongoing integration burden.
Enterprise distributed order management. Platforms such as IBM Sterling Order Management and Manhattan, built for retailers with hundreds of stores doing true distributed order management. Genuinely excellent, and overkill — in both cost and operational complexity — for almost every Australian business reading this.
Most established Australian wholesalers and distributors we speak to land in the third category. Pricing varies widely and is worth checking against each vendor's own current pricing page rather than any comparison article, including this one; our Odoo pricing guide for Australia sets out Odoo's published AUD figures and the implementation costs that sit alongside them.
When might you need more than a standard Odoo setup?
Most businesses never reach this point, but a few situations deserve a closer look before you decide anything. In each one the right answer depends on your volumes, your channels and the systems you already run, so it is a conversation rather than a rule of thumb.
Very high channel counts. If you are live on a dozen marketplaces across several countries, each with its own rules for pricing, returns and service levels, talk to us about how those rules would map into Odoo before you choose an approach.
Marketplace-first sellers at volume. If nearly all your revenue comes through marketplaces, at tens of thousands of orders a month with listings as the core discipline, talk to us about how Odoo's marketplace connectors would handle that volume and whether anything should sit alongside it.
Order routing across a large store network. Ship-from-store, click-and-collect and endless-aisle across a national retail footprint, with live stock availability promised at the point of sale, are demanding requirements. Talk to us about whether Odoo's routing rules cover your network as configured.
A core system you are keeping. If the business runs on an ERP that is staying for good reasons, the question becomes how order management connects to it, and that is worth working through before you buy anything.
Outside those cases, a second system usually adds an integration to maintain and a second version of the truth about your stock. If you think you are in one of these four situations, that is exactly what a Fit Assessment is for.
How do you choose the right order management system?
A short, unglamorous process beats a feature comparison matrix.
Write down your channels, now and in two years. The number of sales channels drives more of this decision than order volume does.
Count the manual handoffs. Walk one order through your business and write down every point where a human moves data between systems. That list is your business case, and it is specific enough to test a demo against.
Decide where stock truth will live. One system has to be the authority on inventory levels. Decide which before you buy, not after.
Test with your own awkward orders. Not the vendor's demo data. A part-shipped order, a customer-specific price, a return, a backorder, an order that needs two warehouses.
Check the Australian specifics. GST and BAS handled natively, local shipping carriers, and if you supply the major retailers, the EDI formats they require.
Cost the whole thing, including the year after go-live. Licences, implementation, data migration, training, and the integration maintenance if you are running more than one system.
Where WAO Group fits
WAO Group implements Odoo for Australian wholesalers, distributors, manufacturers and retailers. We were named Winner, Odoo Customer Choice Award (ANZ) 2026, hold 10+ certified Odoo experts and 95%+ client satisfaction (Odoo partner directory), and were an Odoo Gold Partner in 2025 and 2026. A.J. Wilson Wholesale Food Distributors, who moved their order handling onto Odoo with us, got back about two days a week for the owner personally.
If you are weighing up whether you need an order management system or a single platform that already includes one, book a free 30-minute Odoo Fit Assessment and we will tell you which — including when the answer is to stay where you are.
Frequently asked questions
Order management is the end-to-end handling of a customer order: capturing it, checking stock, pricing and approving it, picking and shipping it, keeping the customer informed, and invoicing it. Order management software is the system that does this in one place rather than across several.
It is one central list of every order your business has taken, from every channel, with the current status of each and the stock and shipping information attached. Everything else an OMS does is built on having that single list.
Shopify manages orders placed through Shopify well. It becomes a constraint when you sell through other channels too, because those orders are not in it, and when stock lives in more than one place. At that point most businesses either add an order and inventory layer or move to a system that holds all channels.
A CRM manages the relationship before the sale — leads, opportunities, quotes and the history of your dealings with a customer. An OMS manages what happens after they say yes. In Odoo both sit in the same system, so the quotation a salesperson sends becomes the order the warehouse picks without anything being re-entered.
Often not. With one warehouse and one sales channel, order routing is not a problem you have, and a good accounting-plus-inventory setup may be sufficient. The case for a proper system grows with each channel you add, not each pallet.
Yes. Odoo handles order management through its Sales, Inventory, Purchase and Accounting apps working on one database, which covers order capture across channels, real time inventory, automated routing to multiple fulfilment locations, delivery and invoicing. For most Australian wholesalers and online sellers it removes the need for a separate OMS.
It depends on how many channels you are connecting and how clean your product and customer data is. A single-channel wholesaler is a different project from a multi-marketplace seller with EDI into two major retailers. The data clean-up is usually the long pole, not the software.
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