Why HotWax Commerce is the Best Order Management Software for Shopify Retailers?

The retail industry is evolving rapidly, and streamlined omnichannel operations are key to staying competitive. Shopify has become a go-to platform for eCommerce and in-store POS systems, while NetSuite often serves as the backbone for ERP and warehouse fulfillment.

However, integrating these system presents various challenges for retailers relying on third-party connectors, like Celigo. These connectors often struggle with accurate data synchronization and fail to meet the sophisticated demands of modern omnichannel strategies. Retailers need Order Management Software that not only bridges these gaps but also enhances their overall omnichannel operations. This is where HotWax Commerce excels.

This blog explains why HotWax Commerce is the best Order Management Software for Shopify retailers, highlighting its unique capabilities and the tangible benefits it brings to omnichannel retailing.

Focused on Shopify Ecosystem

HotWax Commerce is designed to be the best Order Management Software for retailers using Shopify for eCommerce and Shopify POS for in-store operations.

Most of our customers rely on Shopify, driving our commitment to cover all possible scenarios in our integration. By addressing every corner case that retailers encounter, HotWax Commerce ensures comprehensive and reliable solutions tailored to the unique needs and challenges of Shopify retailers, making it the optimal choice for delivering an omnichannel experience.

• Native Integrations with Shopify and NetSuite: HotWax Commerce recognizes that most Shopify retailers leverage NetSuite as their ERP system. To support this, HotWax Commerce offers a, ready integration with NetSuite, ensuring accurate data synchronization between Shopify and NetSuite.

  By serving as the integration channel between Shopify and NetSuite, HotWax Commerce not only streamlines data synchronization but also ensures up-to-date financials and bookkeeping. In the next sections, we’ll break down the benefits and functionalities of this pre-built integration.

• Expert Consultation and Support: Beyond technical integrations, HotWax Commerce offers expert consulting as part of our onboarding process to help retailers make the best use of the Shopify ecosystem for delivering an omnichannel experience. This includes detailed guidance on how to configure and utilize Shopify and Shopify POS for various business models, ensuring that retailers can fully leverage the platform's capabilities. For example, retailers managing multiple brands under one umbrella can use HotWax Commerce to maintain separate inventories, streamline order processing and fulfillment based on unique needs of the different brands.

• Omnichannel Strategy Implementation: HotWax Commerce helps retailers in developing and implementing omnichannel strategies, such as BOPIS, Ship-From-Store, and Pre-Order/Backorder Management. The consultation covers best practices for inventory allocation, order routing, and fulfillment, optimizing these strategies for maximum efficiency and customer satisfaction.

• Experience with Multiple POS Setups: HotWax Commerce has experience with various retail setups, whether Shopify eCommerce retailers are using Shopify POS or other enterprise POS systems.

  Some of our clients, like Frank And Oak, use Shopify POS at their stores, while others, like Steve Madden, use Xstore and PredictSpring. HotWax Commerce offers robust integration capabilities for both setups, ensuring smooth omnichannel operations regardless of the POS system in use.

• Maximize API Throughput: HotWax Commerce is designed to scale with businesses of all sizes. It maximizes throughput of Shopify APIs for scalable integration. This scalability ensures that as businesses expand, HotWax Commerce can handle increasing volumes of data and transactions efficiently, providing a reliable and flexible solution for order management needs.

  For example, some of our enterprise clients process more than 50,000 orders per day during the holiday season. HotWax Commerce is built to handle such significant order volumes, ensuring smooth operations even during peak times. Whether a retailer is processing a few hundred orders per day or tens of thousands, HotWax Commerce scales to meet their needs, maintaining performance and reliability across all sales channels.

• Support for Special Products: HotWax Commerce specializes in Shopify, covering every corner case that retailers encounter in running their business on Shopify and Shopify POS.

  Even the most unique use cases, such as end-to-end management of gift cards, bundle products and service products are handled easily in both Shopify and NetSuite. We’ll discuss how these features enhance the overall retail experience later in the blog.

Strong Alignment with Shopify’s Roadmap

HotWax Commerce is dedicated to aligning with Shopify’s roadmap, ensuring that the Order Management Software supports new Shopify features as soon as they are released. This alignment guarantees that your business can leverage the latest developments from Shopify without delay.

• Monitoring Major Updates: HotWax Commerce actively tracks Shopify’s major summer and winter releases, and keeps an eye on monthly change logs. This proactive approach ensures that any new features or enhancements from Shopify are quickly integrated into the HotWax Commerce.

  For example, HotWax Commerce recently released Exchanges 2.0, demonstrating its commitment to staying ahead of industry changes and supporting retailers effectively.

• API Release Tracking: By closely monitoring Shopify’s API releases, HotWax Commerce stays informed about new endpoints and deprecated ones. This allows HotWax Commerce to plan for necessary updates and migration strategies, ensuring smooth transitions and minimal disruptions for retailers.

  For example, when Shopify announced the new Fulfillment API, HotWax Commerce upgraded all clients to the latest version. This upgrade ensured that retailers could leverage the latest features and avoid any potential issues related to the deprecation of the older API version.

• Impact Assessments: HotWax Commerce product team conducts thorough impact assessments to evaluate how Shopify’s releases will affect existing workflows and future plans. This involves prioritizing updates and planning improvements at least one to two months ahead of deadlines, ensuring timely and effective integration of new features.

• Client Communication: To keep clients informed and aligned with their priorities, HotWax Commerce discusses implementation plans in client meetings. This collaborative approach ensures that updates are integrated into the product roadmap based on client needs and timelines, allowing retailers to make the most of Shopify’s latest innovations.

Pre-built Integration with Shopify

When retailers deploy an Order Management Software, significant time and money are spent on developing custom integrations. HotWax Commerce addresses this challenge by offering a pre-built integration with Shopify and Shopify POS, leveraging modern integration technologies like GraphQL and REST APIs. This approach streamlines data exchange, ensuring reliability and scalability for retail operations.

Let's understand how the pre-built integration with Shopify and Shopify POS makes HotWax Commerce the best Order Management Software for retailers:

• Fast Implementation: With a ready integration framework already in place, retailers can significantly reduce their time to market. This allows for quick implementation of HotWax Commerce, enabling retailers to start reaping the benefits of omnichannel retail without lengthy setup times.

• Reduced Risk of Failure: The proven integration methodology minimizes the risk of errors and disruptions during implementation, providing a smooth transition and ensuring consistent operations.

• Nearly Zero Implementation Cost: The out-of-the-box integration reduces the need for extensive custom development, thereby lowering overall implementation costs and making the transition more cost-effective.

• Maximize Order Throughput: HotWax Commerce maximizes order throughput by utilizing Shopify's API limits effectively. This ensures that retailers can handle high volumes of orders without running into performance issues.

  For example, to avoid errors with large data files, HotWax Commerce limits downloads of orders to 100 orders per API call, optimizing platform utilization and enabling higher throughput, as each order can have multiple items, potentially leading to larger file sizes.

• Streamlined Inventory Management In-Stores: While Shopify POS excels in many areas, it lacks features for managing transfer orders and inventory counting in stores. HotWax Commerce bridges this gap by offering an intuitive Store Inventory Management Suite, designed to make in-store inventory management operations simplified and user-friendly.

Pre-built Integration with NetSuite

Many Shopify retailers use NetSuite as their ERP, and HotWax Commerce offers out-of-the-box integration with NetSuite at no extra cost. Leveraging SuiteScript 2.X APIs, Saved Searches, and the Search Task function, HotWax Commerce facilitates faster and more efficient data exchange. This integration framework guarantees optimized operations and rapid synchronization.

• Omnichannel Ready: Celigo, a common connector used between Shopify and NetSuite, often encounters challenges with critical omnichannel scenarios, such as accurate inventory Available To Promise (ATP) calculations, managing buffer stock, temporarily disabling fulfillment locations, excluding certain products from catalog from shipping or pick-up.

  HotWax Commerce addresses these gaps effectively by providing precise ATP calculations that account for buffer stock and suspended fulfillment locations. This comprehensive approach ensures accurate sellable inventory and prevents overselling, which is crucial for retailers managing multiple fulfillment locations. Additionally, HotWax Commerce supports complex scenarios like excluding specific products from Ship-From-Store or BOPIS, thereby helping retailers fulfill orders according to store-specific strategies.

• Sunsetting Celigo and Reducing Total Cost of Ownership: By adopting HotWax Commerce’s native integration with Shopify and NetSuite, retailers can sunset Celigo, significantly reducing the costs associated with third-party connectors. HotWax Commerce native integrations covers the full spectrum of data synchronization needs from Shopify to NetSuite, eliminating the need for additional middleware and associated expenses.

• Comprehensive Data Integrity and Financial Auditing Tools: Data synchronization between multiple systems can often lead to discrepancies and data leaks. HotWax Commerce addresses these issues with advanced tools designed to prevent data inconsistencies and ensure that financial records in NetSuite are always accurate and current.

  BI Reports & Analytics (BIRA): One critical aspect of integrations is managing data leaks during synchronization between systems. HotWax Commerce’s BIRA tool delivers detailed reports and dashboards on products, orders, and inventory, consolidating multiple data points into a comprehensive overview. This helps identify and address potential data leaks, ensuring accurate and reliable data synchronization between Shopify, HotWax Commerce, and NetSuite.

  

  Omnichannel Retail Sales Auditing Tool (OReSA): The OReSA tool is essential for efficient financial management, particularly during month-end closings. It automatically reconciles sales, returns, and appeasements across HotWax Commerce, Shopify, and NetSuite, streamlining the financial period closing process from hours or days to just minutes.

  

Support for Special Products

Retailers often feature a diverse product catalog to cater to varying customer needs, including special products like gift cards, bundle products, and service products. These products require different handling compared to regular items, and most integrations necessitate custom solutions.

HotWax Commerce, however, provides support for these special products in both Shopify and NetSuite. This enables retailers to offer a satisfying customer experience and handle all aspects of order processing and fulfillment of special products across Shopify and NetSuite.

• Gift Cards: HotWax Commerce supports both physical and digital gift cards, managing their entire lifecycle from order synchronization and fulfillment to activation.

  Physical Gift Cards: These tangible cards can be purchased online or in-store, each carrying a unique serial number for redemption. HotWax Commerce manages their order fulfillment, ensures accurate data synchronization to NetSuite, and handles activation flow of these cards on Shopify.

  Digital Gift Cards: These virtual equivalents are sent via email or text to customers, also featuring unique serial numbers for redemption. Digital gift cards are auto-fulfilled in Shopify, HotWax Commerce handles their end-to-end processing, and reports to NetSuite.

• Bundle Products: These products are composed of multiple individual items (components) sold as a single unit. HotWax Commerce ensures accurate inventory management and order fulfillment for bundle products in both Shopify and NetSuite.

  To determine the inventory level of a bundle product, HotWax Commerce first computes the available inventory of all component products. The available bundle inventory is then determined by identifying the component product with the lowest inventory level, referred to as the lowest common denominator (LCD). This ensures a bundle product is only sold on Shopify when all of its components are in stock.

  For example, if a bundle comprises a Sunglass (inventory of 7) and a frame case (inventory of 4), the bundle product's inventory is calculated as 4.

  When an order includes a bundle product, HotWax Commerce checks the inventory level of the bundle product for allocation, so it is only sent to a location that has all the necessary components available. These orders are also synchronized to NetSuite, ensuring financial records are up-to-date.

• Service Products: HotWax Commerce provides support for service products, which are additional services that customers can purchase alongside finished goods. For example, if a customer requests gift wrapping for their order, all items must be wrapped together and fulfilled from a single location.

  HotWax Commerce manages this by grouping service products with the associated items, ensuring these are processed and shipped together. Orders with service products are also accurately synchronized with NetSuite, ensuring efficient fulfillment and that customers receive their personalized orders as expected.

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Choosing the right Order Management Software is critical for retailers aiming to refine their omnichannel operations, and HotWax Commerce stands out as the top choice for those using Shopify. The deep integration capabilities, commitment to staying aligned with Shopify’s roadmap, and support for special product types, makes the HotWax Commerce Order Management Software that improves efficiency, lowers costs, and ensures accurate data synchronization.

What’s more exciting? HotWax Commerce’s App is available on the Shopify App Store, and its built-in integrations allow for a sandbox setup in as little as two weeks, facilitating efficient testing and training.

Learn more about HotWax Commerce to unlock the full potential of your Shopify and NetSuite ecosystems, and drive your business toward unparalleled success. To get started, contact an expert now!