But for many brands and 3PLs, record-breaking demand exposed cracks in their order management infrastructure. If this is your case, the question that is already burning inside your head (or should be) is: how much revenue did your OMS cost you?
If you experienced any of these three symptoms during peak season, you need to start looking into ways to make your system peak-proof.
Symptom 1: Orders Taking Hours to Process (When Minutes Matter)
What it looks like:
Human errors and poor communication between your selling channels and OMS means orders sit in both of them for an hour, two hours, sometimes longer before reaching your warehouse for fulfillment. During peak periods, this delay may compound on your WMS or 3PLs because the backlog of orders is growing faster than they can be packed and shipped. By the time your fulfillment team sees the order, it’s already behind schedule. Ship times slip. Customers get frustrated. Your same-day or next-day delivery promises become impossible to keep.
Why it happens:
Legacy order management systems process orders in batches, not real-time. When volume spikes during BFCM, these systems queue orders and work through them sequentially. Add in manual routing decisions, approval workflows, or integration bottlenecks, and orders sit waiting instead of moving.
The real cost:
Every hour an order waits is an hour closer to missing your delivery window. Customers who paid for expedited shipping expect speed. When they don’t get it, they complain, request refunds, or worse: they stop coming back.
For 3PLs, slow order processing creates warehouse bottlenecks. Your picking team can’t start work on orders they haven’t received. By the time orders arrive in batches, you’re already playing catch-up for the rest of the day.
If you saw this symptom: Your order processing pipeline has fundamental architecture issues. Batch processing made sense 10 years ago. Today, it’s a competitive disadvantage.
What good infrastructure looks like:
Modern order operations platforms process orders in near-real-time, not batches. Orders should flow from your selling channel to your warehouse management system in minutes even at peak volume. This is what Made In experienced in 2024.
During BFCM 2025, brands using Pipe17 processed orders with no delays, even during the highest-volume hours. Orders moved from capture to fulfillment immediately, giving warehouse teams maximum time to pick, pack, and ship within promised delivery windows.
Symptom 2: Missing Orders (That Just Disappeared)
What it looks like:
You received an order. It’s in your ecommerce platform. The customer was charged. But the order never reached your warehouse. It just… disappeared.
During BFCM, your team was too busy firefighting other issues to troubleshoot. By the time someone noticed, the delivery window had passed. Now you’re apologizing to customers and rushing replacement orders with expedited shipping, eating the cost.
Why it happens:
Orders disappear between systems when integrations fail silently. Your ecommerce platform sends the order to your OMS, ERP or middleware. Something breaks in translation: a mapping error, a timeout, a dropped webhook, an API hiccup. The order gets dropped, but no system alerts you.
Without visibility into order flow, you don’t know there’s a problem until the customer emails asking “where’s my order?”
The real cost:
Every missing order is lost revenue, customer trust, and potential lifetime value. The biggest cost is invisible: how many orders disappeared that you still don’t know about? How many customers assume you’ll fulfill the order and are quietly waiting? And how long will they remain quiet for?
For 3PLs, missing orders create client trust issues. Your brand customers see the order in their selling channel. They assume you received it. When you didn’t, and they only find out through customer complaints, that’s a relationship-damaging conversation.
If you saw this symptom: You have integration blind spots. Orders are moving through systems without adequate visibility or error handling. This affects you beyond peak periods: it’s happening every day, you just don’t know about it.
What good infrastructure looks like:
Modern order operations platforms provide end-to-end visibility and proactive exception management. If an order fails to reach your warehouse, you should know immediately, before the customer does. Orthofeet already experienced this transformation when they migrated to Pipe17 and took advantage of our managed network of connectors.
Our exception management automatically surfaces issues: orders that didn’t sync, mappings that failed, integrations that timed out. Instead of discovering problems through customer complaints, operations teams see exceptions in real-time with enough context to resolve them in minutes.
Symptom 3: Inventory Sync Issues (Overselling or Underselling)
What it looks like:
The oversell scenario:Shopify sold 5 units in an hour. Your inventory syncs daily. Walmart didn’t get those updates until the next morning. Walmart sold 5 more units. Now you’re missing 5 products because your stock was only 5 units to begin with. You’re either canceling orders (destroying trust with that marketplace), backfilling inventory a month later (angry customers), or rush-ordering replacement inventory at premium cost (margin destruction).
The undersell scenario: You have inventory available: maybe it’s in Amazon FBA that could fulfill via Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF), or it’s at a different warehouse. But your ecommerce platform shows “out of stock” because your inventory sync is too slow or doesn’t aggregate across multiple locations. You ran out of inventory on Shopify while you had sellable inventory sitting elsewhere. That’s potential revenue you just lost.
Why it happens:
Batch inventory updates can’t keep pace with modern commerce. When you’re selling across multiple channels simultaneously, inventory changes by the minute. Batch syncs create windows where your inventory counts are wrong.
Even worse: many systems don’t aggregate inventory across multiple fulfillment locations or support channel-specific allocation rules, resulting in inventory silos. So you can’t sell Amazon FBA inventory through Shopify, or you can’t intelligently allocate scarce inventory to your highest-margin channels.
The real cost:
Overselling: Customer cancellations, marketplace penalties, rush shipping costs, and damaged relationships with retail partners.
Underselling: Lost sales that you’ll never recover. Multiply a few units per product by thousands of products across a weekend like BFCM, and you’re looking at six or seven figures of missed revenue.
One Pipe17 customer calculated they undersold by 20% during previous peak seasons because their inventory wasn’t aggregating across fulfillment locations in real-time. That’s a transformational amount of lost revenue.
If you saw this symptom: Your inventory accuracy is costing you sales every single day, not just during peak periods. You’re either disappointing customers with cancellations or missing revenue opportunities because your systems aren’t surfacing what you actually have available to sell.
What good infrastructure looks like:
Real-time inventory synchronization across all selling channels, fulfillment locations and systems of record (like ERPs). When a unit sells on any channel, every other channel should reflect that change within minutes.
Pipe17 provides near-real-time omnichannel inventory sync with intelligent aggregation across multiple fulfillment partners. If you have inventory in Amazon FBA, your own warehouse, and two 3PLs, Pipe17 aggregates that into a single available-to-promise number that updates across all your selling channels as orders are placed.
This works both ways: preventing oversells by accurately decrementing inventory in real-time, and maximizing sales by surfacing all available inventory across your fulfillment network.
The Pattern: Infrastructure Breaks Under Pressure
All three of these symptoms are infrastructure problems that reveal themselves under pressure.
During BFCM, when:
order volume spikes 3-5x
every channel is selling simultaneously
inventory turns over in hours instead of days
small inefficiencies compound into operational crises.
The brands that thrive during BFCM have infrastructure built for peak performance.
What Modern Order Operations Infrastructure Actually Delivers
If your BFCM revealed any of these symptoms, here’s what upgrading to modern order operations platform like Pipe17 does for your infrastructure:
Real-Time Order Processing
Orders automatically flow from selling channels to fulfillment in minutes, even during peak volume. No batching, no queuing, no manual routing bottlenecks.
Result: Warehouse teams get maximum time to fulfill orders within delivery windows. Customers get their products faster. You can confidently promise same-day or next-day shipping even during peak season.
Proactive Exception Management
Every order is continuously monitored from end-to-end. If something breaks the right person is notified immediately with enough context to fix it.
Result: No more missing orders discovered through customer complaints. Operations teams resolve issues before they impact customers. Your support team stops firefighting and starts providing actual customer service.
Near-Real-Time Inventory Synchronization
Inventory updates propagate across back-office apps as well as all channels and fulfillment locations within minutes. Intelligent inventory aggregation gives you a true available-to-promise view across your entire fulfillment network.
Pipe17 maintains and updates hundreds of pre-built connectors as partner APIs change. Unlike iPaaS, we deliver bulletproof reliability at scale without third parties or developer intervention.
Result: Unlike iPaaS and other solutions who offer integrations, Pipe 17 manages the relational mappings for our connectors. This means we deepen the synchronization and adjust to changes without you needing to involve your IT department.
Why Waiting Until Next BFCM Is a Mistake
It’s tempting to think: “We survived BFCM 2025. We’ll deal with this before BFCM 2026.”
But remember: these problems are costing you revenue every single day, not just during peak season.
The real winners in modern commerce are the brands with the infrastructure necessary to
capture more revenue from the same traffic,
fulfill orders faster with the same warehouse capacity
scale operations without proportionally scaling costs
BFCM didn’t create your infrastructure problems. It just made them impossible to ignore.
If you recognize your BFCM experience in any of these three symptoms, you should start looking into upgrading your infrastructure to be better built for modern commerce. Real-time order processing. Proactive exception management. Intelligent inventory synchronization. The operational capabilities that brands and 3PLs use to turn peak season from crisis to competitive advantage.
Now, where should you start? Well, that depends on your current architecture. Want to know the best pathway to modern order operations infrastructure? Book a demo with Pipe17 and we’ll show you how brands eliminated these exact problems during peak periods and all year-round.
Your next peak season doesn’t have to look like your last one.
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