Integrate carrier booking inside the order management system
Authors:
Michael Wholohan, Holger Lierse
Changed on:
14 Nov 2025
Problem
Warehouse and store staff responsible for picking and packing orders are often required to leave the order management system to manually book shipments in separate carrier platforms, creating inefficient workflows and opportunities for errors.
This lack of integrated carrier booking increases processing time per order, requires duplicate data entry, and slows overall fulfilment operations. The manual handoff between systems reduces throughput, increases labor costs, and creates potential for shipping errors or delays.
Example
A fulfillment center processing orders for a multi-brand retailer required warehouse staff to complete picking in their WMS, then manually log into separate carrier portals to book each shipment. For high-volume days with hundreds of orders, staff spent hours copying order details, selecting service levels, and generating labels across different carrier systems manually. This manual process created a bottleneck in their shipping workflow, limited their daily order capacity, and frequently resulted in data entry errors that caused misrouted packages.
Solution Overview
Fluent Order Management eliminates the manual, error-prone step of logging into external carrier platforms by providing Native Carrier Integration. Fluent connects directly with a wide network of global carriers, 3PLs, and Transport Management Systems via an API-first approach, allowing staff to book shipments, generate labels, and capture tracking information directly within the Fluent OMS interface.
Crucially, the system supports Automated Service Selection, using intelligent logic to instantly determine and select the optimal carrier service level for the shipment based on the customer's choice and retailer cost rules. This efficiency is maximised because staff can perform In-System Label and Manifest Generation directly within the Fluent web applications, creating a seamless, single-system workflow that prevents bottlenecks.
Additionally, once the label is created, the system enables Real-Time Tracking and Status Sync, automatically capturing the tracking number and sharing it with the customer.
By implementing Fluent OMS for integrated carrier booking, retailers can transform their shipping processes by:
- Increasing Throughput: Eliminating the bottleneck of manual data entry allowing the fulfilment centres to process a significantly higher volume of orders daily, especially during peak seasons.
- Reducing Labor Costs and Errors: Labor time spent copying data is eliminated, and errors that lead to misrouted packages or incorrect charges are virtually removed.
- Simplified Staff Training: Fulfilment staff only need to learn one system (Fluent OMS), simplifying training and deployment across stores and warehouses.
