The 2025 holiday season is right around the corner, which makes this the best time to get your Order Management System (OMS) in shape. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other high-traffic days will test your operations, and a few adjustments now can go a long way in keeping things smooth.
In this blog, we’ll tackle three practical questions retailers often ask:
- • What operational changes are necessary for the holiday season?
- • What are the best practices for order routing rules?
- • Do I need to make changes to our Shopify integration?
Holiday operations
During the holiday season, customer foot traffic increases significantly, requiring adjustments to your store’s shipping schedules. To avoid overlap with peak in-store hours, analyze your Point of Sale (POS) sales data by the minute and compare it across all brokering rules. Identify slower periods when your stores can focus on fulfilling online orders and align your schedules accordingly. Once your schedules are set, the next step is configuring your order routing to support both in-store and online demands.
Configure order routing
The most important thing when configuring routing for the holidays is making sure it doesn’t disrupt in-store operations while still keeping the promises made to online customers. Routing rules are unique to every retailer’s Ship From Store strategy. The guidance below can help with priorities, but rules must always be contextualized before implementation.
Do you have a warehouse?
If you operate both warehouses and stores, keep your routing strategy simple. Stock as much eCommerce inventory as possible in the warehouse and use stores as backup for oversold items. It may feel counterintuitive when thinking about omnichannel routing, but peak seasons are high-pressure times. Keeping responsibilities focused at stores is critical for a reliable customer experience.
If you don’t have a warehouse
Retailers who fulfill all eCommerce orders from stores need a different approach. Here’s what to consider:
Store Size:
Disable fulfillment from smaller stores if possible. Only assign orders to them when absolutely necessary to avoid cancellations.
Inventory depth:
Your order routing schedule needs to factor in inventory depth. If a store is fulfilling online orders, it should have enough stock of fast-moving SKUs so staff can pull items for online orders before they sell out to walk-in shoppers.
If your store inventory strategy focuses on carrying a wide range of SKUs in smaller quantities, then order ingestion and routing need to happen in real time. Every minute an order isn’t allocated increases the chances that the items go out of stock at the best fulfillment locations.
To reduce exceptions with shallow inventory, configure a brokering safety stock in your routing rules. This isn’t the same as the safety stock you display online. Instead, it’s a minimum stock check that runs when a routing rule is applied. For example, set the routing engine to first try allocating an order to a location with at least five units of each item, and only work down to thinner inventory if needed.
In short, build depth for products you know will spike in online sales. But if that’s not possible, lean on near real-time routing to avoid stockouts. And if you’re enabling real-time workflows to manage shallow inventory, then making sure your Shopify integration is configured correctly is the natural next step.
Shopify order sync
Depending on your inventory strategy, you’ll either be syncing orders in real time or batching them to optimize routing.
Batched order processing
If you’re doing batched order routing, then your order imports from Shopify should also run in batches. During the holiday season, customers often make mistakes, forgetting to add items to their cart, applying the wrong discount, or editing a gift message. Once an order syncs into the OMS, routing rules begin, post-processing takes place, and downstream systems update. At that point, editing the order becomes technically difficult, and it’s hard for customer service teams to stop fulfillment once it has started.
A simple solution is to add a buffer time to your order import, in other words a minimum order age. For example, holding an order in Shopify for 15 minutes before importing it into the OMS gives customers a short window to make changes before the fulfillment lifecycle begins.
Real-time order processing
Retailers with shallow inventory can’t afford this kind of delay between order creation and allocation. In that case, order edits should be handled by cloning the updated order and canceling the original, ensuring allocation happens without losing valuable time.
Getting your OMS holiday ready
The 2025 holiday season presents unique challenges, but with strategic OMS adjustments, you can navigate the rush with confidence. By aligning shipping schedules with store traffic, tailoring order routing to your inventory model, and optimizing your Shopify integration, you’ll deliver a seamless experience for both online and in-store customers.
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Every retailer’s setup is unique, so adapt these strategies to your specific needs. If you’re facing challenges with omnichannel fulfillment or want personalized guidance, book a free consultation with our team to refine your setup for Holiday 2025. Visit our website to schedule a meeting and ensure your OMS is ready for the season ahead.
