5 Signs Your Business Has Outgrown Your Current OMS

Selling today means meeting shoppers wherever they buy; on your website, Amazon, Walmart, or TikTok Shop. Many businesses struggle to maintain all these channels because their order management system (OMS) simply can’t handle the realities of diversified commerce. You might not realize you’ve outgrown your OMS because your operations teams often create workarounds that mask deeper issues. They add manual steps, and you hire more people, which in the short term might work, but sets up bigger problems down the road. Recognizing these warning signs early lets you:

• Cut operational costs across fulfillment and IT
• Improve inventory accuracy across every sales channel
• Respond faster to changes in customer demand and market conditions
• Expand to new selling channels without re-architecting your systems

Now, let’s explore these signs so you can be aware of what to watch out for…

Sign #1: Your IT Backlog Never Shrinks

If your developers frequently spend most of their time maintaining your existing OMS rather than building features that drive the business forward, that’s a sign you’ve outgrown your OMS. “We see this problem across the industry,” explains Mo Afshar, CEO of Pipe17. “Brands reach a point where their OMS becomes so complicated that it drains all their technical resources. They waste valuable developer time just keeping things running.”

This tech drain shows up when:

• You wait weeks for basic workflow changes
• Every new connection needs custom coding
• Small updates break other parts of your system
• You add more people to your team, but never catch up

Every hour your developers spend maintaining old systems, you lose money, and you can’t scale. While you patch your existing system, your competitors add new selling channels and capture market share you can’t reach.

Sign #2: Adding New Sales Channels Takes Forever

When you want to start selling on a new channel, such as Walmart Marketplace or TikTok Shop, speed is everything. Competitors with flexible systems can launch in a matter of days. With legacy OMS, you’ll wait several months.

A whitepaper titled Delivering the Modern Brand Promise by RMW Commerce shows that today’s shoppers use about six touchpoints before buying, and half interact across four or more. Brands selling on three or more channels experience a 494% higher order rate compared to those selling on a single channel. But with rigid systems, you can’t capitalize on this opportunity.

This delay hurts your business when:

• Connecting to a new marketplace takes 3+ months of development
• Social commerce platforms require custom integrations
• International expansion gets sidelined due to complexity
• You miss seasonal selling opportunities, waiting for tech work

Imagine losing millions in potential revenue while waiting for developers to connect your system to the latest shopping platform. That’s the real cost of an inflexible OMS.

Sign #3: Your Inventory Numbers Never Match

If your website says something’s in stock but Amazon says it’s not, you’ve got a serious OMS issue. That kind of mismatch leads to orders you can’t fill and a bunch of headaches you didn’t sign up for.

“Inventory accuracy forms the backbone of customer trust,” says Mo Afshar. “When your systems disagree about what you have available, you create disappointed customers and waste money on excess stock.”

• You’ll recognize this problem when:
• You oversell products that aren’t actually available
• Customer service constantly handles “where’s my order” complaints
• You carry extra “just in case” inventory to avoid stockouts
• Your team manually adjusts numbers between systems every day

Inventory problems directly hit your bottom line from both sides. You lose sales and waste capital on extra inventory because you don’t trust your numbers, and you risk breaking customer trust when they order items you can’t deliver.

Sign #4: Your Team Spends All Day Fixing Exceptions

Instead of optimizing your business and driving growth, your operations team manually patches holes in a sinking ship. Mary Ruth Organics faced this exact problem before modernizing their approach. Their team had to go through 20+ manual steps to complete processes that should have occurred automatically.

This operational drain cripples your business when:

• Your team builds complex spreadsheets just to know what inventory exists where
• Someone must personally review and route every non-standard order
• Customer service spends hours tracking down order status across disconnected systems
• Developers repeatedly fix the same issues because the root cause remains unsolved

According to a report by Forrester, companies with outdated OMS spend 60-75% of their operational budget just maintaining their legacy systems. During peak seasons like Black Friday, this approach collapses entirely as order volume overwhelms manual processes.

The hidden cost is even greater than the obvious labor expense. When your operations team spends all day fighting fires, they can’t identify cost-saving opportunities or efficiency improvements.

Sign #5: You Can’t Trust Your Data

Data inconsistency paralyzes your entire organization. When your marketing team sees different inventory numbers than your warehouse team, it erodes trust and confidence.

“Bad data costs you twice,” explains Mo Afshar. “First, you make poor decisions based on incorrect information. Then you waste resources trying to fix problems that those decisions create. We’ve seen companies unknowingly leave hundreds of thousands of dollars of sellable inventory sitting idle because their systems couldn’t track it properly.”

This matters because data accuracy directly impacts your cash flow and competitive position. When you’re forced to reconcile data manually before making basic decisions, you move at a snail’s pace while competitors with unified data act immediately. When you don’t trust your inventory numbers, you either overstock (locking up capital) or understock (missing sales). Neither approach lets you grow profitably.

More critically, inconsistent data undermines executive confidence. When leadership stops trusting operational reports, they begin making decisions based on intuition rather than facts. That’s where truly expensive mistakes happen.

The Breaking Point: When Optimization Isn’t Enough

Many businesses continue to add customizations and workarounds to their OMS, hoping to extend its lifespan. This approach works for a while, but eventually fails.

Businesses continue investing in customizations despite mounting evidence that their systems have reached their structural limits. This creates increasingly fragile operations where:

• Every change needs extensive testing
• Simple updates cause unexpected problems
• System performance suffers despite upgrades
• Costs keep rising with no improvements in efficiency

Delaying modernization costs more than just maintenance fees. You lose revenue from slow channel expansion, waste capital on excess inventory, and disappoint customers with fulfillment errors. These costs compound every month and year that you delay addressing the core problem.

At some point, you realize your OMS wasn’t built for modern commerce operations. It was designed for a simpler retail world that no longer exists.

Don’t Let a Stretched OMS Hold You Back

Legacy OMS systems weren’t built for the speed or complexity of today’s commerce. When operations slow down, inventory levels fluctuate, and new channel launches stall, the business suffers. These limitations cost teams time, money, and trust.

Pipe17 connects the systems you already use, automates the processes your team is currently performing manually, and provides a clear view of every order and every unit of inventory in motion. No drawn-out implementations. No rip-and-replace.

You can fix this. And you don’t have to start over to do it.

Book a 30-minute consultation and see how quickly your order operations can start working for you again.

Frequently Asked Questions