Make changes and amendments to in-flight orders
Authors:
Michael Wholohan, Holger Lierse
Changed on:
17 Nov 2025
Problem
Customers frequently need to modify orders after placement, whether updating shipping addresses, changing items, or adjusting quantities.
Without flexible order amendment capabilities, retailers must either reject change requests or manually cancel and recreate orders, leading to poor customer experiences, increased service costs, and potential revenue loss. This rigidity prevents retailers from accommodating reasonable customer requests and creates friction in the post-purchase experience.
Example
A furniture retailer received frequent customer requests to modify orders after placement, including changing delivery dates for large items or updating shipping addresses when customers moved. Their system couldn't handle amendments, forcing customer service to manually cancel the original order and create a new one, which often triggered duplicate charges that took days to resolve. During peak seasons, the team spent over 30% of their time managing order changes, and many frustrated customers simply cancelled entirely rather than dealing with the cumbersome process.
Solution Overview
Fluent Order Management manages the entire end to end order lifecycle, providing the flexibility to make authorised amendments to in-flight orders without requiring manual cancellation and re-creation, which drastically improves service efficiency and customer experience.
Fluent achieves this via our Order Orchestration capability, where statuses are defined within the order lifecycle that track the exact state of every line item and allows our clients to defines strict amendment windows based on fulfilment milestones (e.g. changes allowed only before the picking process starts). This structure ensures amendments are only made when physically possible, protecting warehouse operations.
The core amendment functionality is defined within the order orchestration engine, which handles complex modifications logic such as changing items, quantities, or shipping addresses and automatically re-validates and re-routes the order as necessary.
In addition, Fluent can also orchestrate the downstream systems and processes from these order amendments such as Payment Recalculation and Adjustment for example, communicating necessary changes to the payment gateway to automatically manage the financial impact and eliminate frustrating duplicate charges.
Full Order Amendment capability is delivered through the OMS and Store web applications, providing our clients with a centralised Customer Service view within the OMS, giving service agents the ability to search, view and amend orders for the customer at any time defined during the order lifecycle including the last moment of the process.
By implementing Fluent OMS, retailers can transform order amendment from a costly burden into a competitive advantage, driving:
- Significant Cost Reduction: Customer service time spent on manual order changes is drastically reduced, freeing up resources to focus on complex, revenue-generating tasks.
- Reduced Order Cancellations: The simplified, automated process eliminates the friction that previously caused frustrated customers to cancel orders entirely, directly preserving revenue.
- Enhanced Customer Loyalty: The retailer can accommodate reasonable post-purchase requests quickly and efficiently, strengthening customer trust and reinforcing a reputation for flexible, reliable service.
