From POS to Doorstep: Inside the Systems Powering Omnichannel Retail

In today’s dynamic retail environment, customer expectations are evolving faster than ever. Shoppers no longer distinguish between channels. They expect seamless, personalized experiences whether browsing online, ordering via mobile apps, or picking up items in-store.

Retail is rapidly transitioning into a multi-format, omnichannel environment. Consumers expect a unified product view, fast delivery, and minimal turnaround time. As a result, sales are now recorded through a variety of channels, including e-commerce websites, mobile apps, tele-orders, fixed and mobile POS, and in-store kiosks. Designing robust order management solutions requires retailers to factor in these diverse sales touchpoints. A strong omnichannel retail strategy helps merge these touchpoints into one coherent experience, reducing complexity and boosting customer satisfaction.

For retailers, this means crafting an integrated strategy that not only unifies multiple sales and fulfilment touchpoints but also ensures a consistent, intelligent order lifecycle from start to finish. This blog explores the considerations for omnichannel customer journeys, core strategies, systems, and operational frameworks required to build effective omnichannel journeys that meet these modern demands. 

The Evolving Retail Landscape 

Omnichannel Order Lifecycle 

Every omnichannel order follows three key stages: 

• Order Creation: Initiated from any channel, such as online, in-store, or call centers. 
• Order Sourcing: Inventory is reserved from a store or warehouse. 
• Order Fulfilment: The product is delivered or picked up. 

The interplay of these locations – originating, sourcing, and fulfilment – defines the order routing strategy. Notably: 

• For delivery orders, sourcing and fulfilment locations are the same. 
• For pickup orders, sourcing and fulfillment may differ if the pickup location lacks inventory.

Retailers that rely on efficient retail inventory management systems are better positioned to track these stages and avoid stock-outs, misroutes, and delivery delays.

Embracing a proactive omnichannel order lifecycle minimizes disruptions and ensures every stage runs smoothly.

Order Splitting and Reallocation 

When a single sourcing location cannot fulfil the entire order, order splitting is used to source items from multiple locations. If inventory is damaged or unavailable, the sourcing system updates the Order Management System (OMS), which can reallocate the affected order lines to alternate locations, subject to business logic and routing rules. This flexible approach is a key benefit of advanced omnichannel order management systems that adapt to real-time supply challenges.

Intelligent Order Routing

An effective omnichannel retail strategy depends on intelligent order routing—the ability to assign orders to the most optimal fulfillment location based on real-time inventory, proximity to the customer, predefined business rules (like zonal or store priorities), and product demand patterns.

Effective order routing requires integration with systems that can evaluate inventory availability, the distance to the delivery or pickup location, business rules such as zonal preferences or location priorities, and optimal order distribution based on the sales velocity of products.

Solutions such as Oracle Retail Order Broker exemplify how this can be achieved. The platform dynamically routes orders to the most suitable sourcing location and integrates seamlessly with Oracle’s Xstore POS and Order Management systems, supporting end-to-end visibility and coordination across channels.

To realize these capabilities, retailers must unify core systems – POS, OMS, inventory, and fulfillment – within a cohesive framework that supports real-time decision-making. Platforms like the Oracle Retail Merchandising System make this possible, but the outcome hinges on effective implementation.

This is where experienced system integrators, such as SkillNet, add critical value. By designing and deploying the right integrations, they help retailers activate a unified omnichannel retail strategy, enabling seamless operations from store to doorstep. The result is improved order accuracy, faster fulfillment, greater flexibility in payments, and a consistently elevated customer experience.

Flexible Payment Models for Delivery Orders 

Usually, for delivery orders, retailers prefer to have options for upfront payment and then sourcing and fulfillment, but there are specific business needs to allow flexibility in payments in terms of accepting the payment at the customer’s delivery address when the item is finally delivered.

This requires an omnichannel order solution:

• To keep the order payments open even after the order is fulfilled. Or 

• To have some option to mark the order as fulfilled after confirming the payment (keeping shipment and fulfilment as separate for delivery orders).

• To fulfill the order through the standard process using a temporary tender type, and later reconcile it with the actual payment received from the customer via tender mapping.

Such an approach requires an additional operational process to be designed and managed. However, these flexible payment solutions in retail also ( delete also) support varied consumer behaviors and drive customer trust during the order lifecycle.

Internal and External Transfers 

• For pickup orders with insufficient store inventory, internal transfers are triggered from sourcing to pickup location. 
• For delivery orders, external shipments are initiated from the sourcing location to the customer. 

To manage these fulfillment paths effectively, systems must update order line statuses in real time and coordinate shipments accordingly. This requires robust POS integration with inventory and order management systems to ensure accurate execution and a seamless customer experience across channels.

Shipment and Delivery Integration 

For delivery orders, integration with third-party shippers is essential for: 

• Alerts to be sent to the shipper companies, for the item to be picked by the delivery agents from the sourcing location. 
• Shipment status to be updated via APIs or webhooks. 
• Customers to be notified via email or SMS. 

Invoicing and Compliance 

Retailers operating across regions must comply with varying invoicing regulations based on geography, order type, and customer segment.

Invoices may need to be generated at different stages – either at the time of payment or dispatch – and may vary by order type, such as B2B vs. B2C or delivery vs. pickup. This often requires generating multiple document formats, including shipping invoices, tax invoices, or final customer invoices. To manage this complexity, retailers benefit from a centralized invoicing system that can:

• Support diverse regulatory formats
• Integrate with order, payment, and fulfillment modules
• Sync financial data with merchandising and accounting systems

A unified invoicing framework ensures compliance, improves operational efficiency, and supports seamless omnichannel execution.

Order Cancellations and Returns 

Depending on business requirements, order cancellations can be permitted at various stages, such as when the order is new, assigned, or reserved. Once an order is shipped, returns must follow a structured reverse logistics process. A robust solution should support full or partial cancellations across all channels, enable credit note generation, process customer refunds, and manage reverse inventory reservations upon cancellation. Additionally, it must interface seamlessly with invoicing and refund systems through APIs or middleware to ensure smooth and automated transaction handling.

Delivering this level of operational consistency requires deep integration between POS, OMS, payment, and financial systems. Experienced system integrators, such as SkillNet, play a key role in enabling these capabilities, tailoring POS implementations to align with each retailer’s omnichannel retail strategy and ensuring cohesive handling of both sales and service workflows.

Real-Time Order Visibility 

The system should support real-time visibility and updates to the order record from across the channels. 

Middleware often facilitates: 

• Triggering external tasks (e.g., shipment updates, emails) 
• Customer notifications with order and line-level statuses 

Emails can be triggered from any centralized system having email generation capabilities. 

Processing Orders created by other retailers

Once built, the same order infrastructure can be leveraged to process orders created by other retailers, allowing external partner orders to be received and fulfilled through the retailer’s network. These orders typically require mapping items and stock to external locations, assigning orders accordingly, and managing invoicing, returns, and cancellation processes, along with handling financial reconciliations with other retailers. This setup enables retailers to participate in third-party marketplaces or even create their own marketplace using the existing order infrastructure. 

Operational Intelligence and Reporting 

Usually, businesses require visibility into: 

• Orders open for a long time 
• Cancelled, fulfilled, and unfulfilled orders 
• Orders stuck in transit due to system issues 
• Return and reverse logistics data 

Comprehensive reporting ensures continuous optimization of the omnichannel order strategy. Today’s retail requires intelligent systems that can churn the large amounts of data, provide business insights, and perform predictive analytics, helping businesses. This predictive analytics can be fed to various order-creating systems to increase the revenue potential for the business and to increase operational efficiencies.

Foundation Data Requirements 

Accurate, near real-time item-location visibility is critical for effective routing and allocation: 

• All systems across the locations should have real-time inventory visibility. 
• The solution must consider the initial data load and delta updates for the order routing decision, to allocate the orders to specific locations depending on the zonal allocation or stock position, or the distance of the sourcing location from the customer’s address or pick-up location address. 

Leveraging robust foundational data supports efficient omnichannel retail operations and enhances retail POS integration. 

There is also a need to have some operational processes in place for addressing some corner scenarios like reverse logistics when the customer is not available for delivery, payment failed for a cash-on-delivery order, the customer refuses to receive the order, or items are missing in transit during the delivery. 

Strategic Goals of Omnichannel Order Solutions

As retailers look to future-proof their operations, a modern omnichannel order management solution must go beyond basic functionality to support strategic business goals.

At its core, it should reduce stock-outs, optimize sourcing for speed and cost, and minimize inventory handling and logistics overhead. It must also enable seamless cancellations, invoicing, and refunds, while maintaining consistent customer communication throughout the order lifecycle.

Compliance with regulatory and fiscal requirements is critical, as is real-time inventory synchronization across channels to ensure accurate availability.

To support scalability and agility, a cloud-native architecture with API-first integrations is essential, connecting order management, POS, ERP, and logistics systems efficiently.

By leveraging AI-driven insights and automation, retailers can further enhance order routing, fraud detection, and demand forecasting.

Ultimately, a unified view of orders for both customers and store associates is key to delivering transparency, operational efficiency, and exceptional omnichannel experiences.

About SkillNet

SkillNet offers a comprehensive suite of retail solutions, including omnichannel retail strategy support, Oracle Retail services, and POS integration, to help businesses unify operations and elevate customer experiences.

A key enabler of this strategy is StoreHub, SkillNet’s modern middleware framework. More than just a system connector, StoreHub serves as the real-time orchestrator of omnichannel journeys, ensuring that order, payment, inventory, and fulfillment systems work in harmony. By dynamically handling transactions, invoicing, payment events, and order-based workflows, StoreHub helps retailers react instantly to changes in order status, inventory availability, or fulfillment logic.

Whether it’s triggering a store transfer for a pickup order, managing reverse logistics for returns, or ensuring compliance with localized invoicing rules, StoreHub ensures that all systems stay in sync, delivering faster, more intelligent, and resilient omnichannel operations. It plays a critical role in turning complex enterprise architectures into cohesive customer experiences.

Available as a modular, platform-agnostic framework, StoreHub can be deployed across diverse retail environments and has been specifically customized for Oracle Retail ecosystems. Paired with SkillNet’s domain expertise, it enables retailers to simplify complex integrations, respond faster to operational events, and deliver seamless omnichannel experiences.