Add new sales channels via a unified order management layer
Authors:
Michael Wholohan, Holger Lierse
Changed on:
17 Nov 2025
Problem
Expanding into new sales channels like marketplaces, social commerce, or even adding additional business units such as wholesale or B2B orders can be challenging, and often requires custom integration work and technical resources for each channel.
Without a unified order management system that can easily ingest orders from multiple sources, retailers face lengthy implementation timelines, high integration costs, and ongoing maintenance overhead. This limits their ability to quickly capitalise on new revenue opportunities and adapt to evolving consumer shopping behaviours across emerging channels.
Example
A multi-brand fashion retailer wanted to expand from their website into TikTok Shop, Instagram Shopping, and major marketplace platforms to capture younger demographics.
Each channel required custom integration work, taking their development team 3-4 months per channel. By the time they launched on their first marketplace, the seasonal opportunity had passed, and competitors had already established market presence.
The ongoing maintenance of these custom integrations consumed significant IT resources, preventing them from pursuing additional high-potential channels like emerging social commerce platforms.
Solution Overview
Fluent Order Management, powered by its native integration framework Fluent Connect, eliminates the need for complex, custom, point-to-point integrations by providing a Unified Order Capture Layer.
Fluent Connect delivers hosted, managed connectors for any platform, including commerce, payments, and, critically, major marketplaces and social channels, replacing custom development with a platform-managed service. This capability, combined with the Unified Order API, establishes a central, well-documented single point for all orders, standardising data input and drastically shortening implementation timelines.
Leveraging these Fluent Connectors accelerates channel implementation from months down to weeks, allowing the retailer to quickly capitalise on seasonal opportunities and secure first-mover advantage. Once the order is ingested from the various digital sources, Fluent OMS ensures all orders are processed using the same centralised and defined business logic.
By leveraging Fluent OMS's centralised Order Integration capability, particularly through Fluent Connect, retailers can achieve rapid, cost-effective channel growth:
- Rapid Time-to-Market: The retailer can launch on new marketplaces and social channels in weeks, not months, using managed connectors, allowing them to capture seasonal revenue and establish a crucial first-mover advantage.
- Reduced IT Costs and Complexity: The reliance on custom, brittle integrations is replaced by the central platform and Fluent Connect's managed service, dramatically lowering development costs and ongoing maintenance overhead.
- Increased Agility: The unified approach makes it easy to experiment with and adapt to new, high-potential channels (like emerging social commerce platforms) without being bogged down by technical debt or lengthy integration projects.
