Once the backbone of brick-and-mortar retail operations, order management systems (OMS) are no longer relevant. These outdated systems now create bottlenecks, drain resources, and stifle growth in today’s multi-channel commerce world. The cost? Lost revenue, clunky fulfillment, and missed opportunities.
This article cuts through the noise to expose why traditional OMS platforms have become liabilities, what they’re really costing your business, and how a flexible approach to order operations with connected, real-time systems offers the agility brands need to thrive in the new era of diversified commerce.
The Historical Context of Legacy OMS
Legacy OMS platforms like Manhattan and Sterling were built for a different era of retail — one defined by predictable inventory cycles and store-centric operations that functioned adequately with batch processing. In this world, order management systems were architected for an environment where inventory moved at a manageable pace through standardized workflows.
And at the time, these systems worked fine. They provided the structure and control needed in traditional retail environments. However, retail has evolved into a fast-moving, multi-channel ecosystem — and the complexity of commerce operations has increased exponentially since those systems were first designed.
The Modern Commerce Challenge
Today’s brands sell on Shopify, Amazon, Walmart Marketplace, TikTok Shop, and more — all while managing complex fulfillment operations across 3PLs, in-store pickup locations and distributed warehouses.
This proliferation of channels and fulfillment nodes has completely rewritten the rules of engagement for order management. Modern commerce requires near real-time synchronization of inventory, orders, and fulfillment data across dozens of systems. Every sale, stock adjustment, or channel-specific rule needs to sync instantly and accurately—otherwise, brands risk overselling, shipping delays, and lost customer trust.
Legacy OMS platforms were not designed for this purpose. Their closed architectures and rigid data models make them fundamentally incompatible with today’s distributed commerce reality. They struggle with the basic requirements of modern retail, introducing lag and rigidity at precisely the moment businesses need speed and flexibility.
And the consequences go far beyond operational friction:
- Inventory inaccuracies lead to oversold products, missed revenue, and customer service escalations.
- Slow channel onboarding delays new revenue streams by months, not days.
- Custom code and integration workarounds drive up IT costs and create brittle infrastructure that’s difficult to maintain or scale.
- Ops and IT teams are stretched thin, wasting valuable hours reconciling systems instead of driving growth.
The Business Cost of Legacy OMS
The higher cost of maintaining legacy OMS, both financially speaking and in terms of time lost, manifests in various ways throughout the organization. Large teams of developers become necessary just to keep these systems running, while operational staff must manually track down inventory discrepancies across channels and reconcile them in spreadsheets. This operational overhead not only creates problems with visibility and overselling, but it also diverts resources from strategic initiatives and innovation.
There’s also the opportunity cost of lost business agility. Brands can’t move fast to launch on new channels, which directly leads to lost revenue opportunities. When competitors can establish new sales channels in days, while your team requires months, the market advantage shifts dramatically.
When you look closely across your organization, you’ll start to spot these and other signs that your OMS is holding you back.
Technical Patches Are Stopgaps, Not Solutions
To fix the problem, many brands bolt on short-term fixes. They write custom workflow scripts or add integrations just to connect with modern sales channels. However, these supposed “fixes” often end up introducing additional risk. Custom code often breaks during system updates. With every quick fix accumulating new technical debt — draining valuable operations and IT resources—and ultimately driving up developer costs by millions. And all the while, it’s taking them a whopping 6-9 months to integrate and go live on new channels.
The fact is that, regardless of how many technical patches you try to add on to your systems, the fundamental architecture of legacy OMS creates several problems that just can’t be solved:
- Integration debt becomes unsustainable: Point-to-point connections multiply with each new channel or service, creating a tangled web of dependencies
- Batch processing can’t meet real-time needs: When systems only sync periodically, data discrepancies are inevitable
- Customizations create rigidity: The more you customize a legacy system, the harder it becomes to update or expand it
Even with substantial investment, these systems remain fundamentally misaligned with the way modern commerce operates. The cost of maintaining this approach grows while agility declines, creating a negative ROI spiral that only accelerates with time.
Rethinking Order Management: The OMS Alternative
When systems limit inventory visibility or block new channels, it signals a deeper issue. These disruptions highlight structural limitations in a model designed for centralized control. That same rigidity now hinders teams that need to move quickly and adapt in real-time.
Mo Afshar, co-founder of Pipe17, puts it clearly: “When people say OMS, they’re picturing a system that solves everything. But that’s a fantasy. What they really have is a central source of friction.”
So, what’s the answer?
Rather than spinning their wheels to make a failing system work, brands need to focus on proactively changing how they approach order operations in the new era of commerce — and that means rethinking order management entirely.
Understand the Alternative to Legacy OMS
Order operations is the operating layer Pipe17 created for omnichannel retail. It isn’t a newer version of OMS, but a fundamentally different system, purpose-built to handle the speed, fragmentation and orchestration required in modern commerce environments.
Rather than relying on centralized rules and overnight syncs, Pipe17 acts as a live coordination layer between all the systems in a merchant’s stack. It connects sales channels, fulfillment centers, ERPs, and inventory systems through prebuilt integrations that keep data in sync and orders flowing in near real-time.
Pipe17 solves a critical problem: legacy OMS platforms were built to control orders from a centralized source of truth — but struggle to maintain synchronization across today’s multi-channel environments. Pipe17 coordinates that unified source of truth, keeping all systems in sync and orders flowing in real time. This is essential for effective order orchestration. Whether you’re routing TikTok orders through a 3PL or synchronizing inventory across multiple Shopify storefronts, Pipe17 enables different parts of your business to operate independently while staying seamlessly connected.
Our platform also comes pre-integrated with top sales channels and fulfillment providers, significantly reducing implementation time and increasing time to value for operations teams.
Pipe17’s order operations platform has AI built natively into its core, powering intelligent routing and smarter decision-making. With Pipe17’s OMS alternative approach to order operations, teams can add new channels in days and route orders efficiently. It becomes the connective tissue between the systems you already use, without relying on IT to rebuild workflows every time something changes.
Move Without Disruption
Order operations can run alongside your existing OMS or replace it entirely. Brands typically start by integrating Pipe17 into a specific operational gap, such as routing orders from a particular sales channel or syncing inventory across systems. From that first connection, Pipe17 begins to coordinate order flow in near real-time.
A recent Forrester TEI study highlights powerful findings on the impact of adopting a modern, API-driven OMS. Brands that implemented a secondary, more agile OMS to fill gaps in their legacy stack saw a positive ROI in under six months. Notably, “three of the four interviewees said they ultimately intend to incrementally replace their primary OMS with the secondary one,” citing its greater reliability, faster configuration, and ability to accelerate time-to-market—unlocking revenue previously constrained by their legacy system.
As you expand usage, this may involve plugging in a second channel, routing orders through a new 3PL, or synchronizing inventory with an ERP. At each step, Pipe17 coordinates activity across systems without disrupting existing workflows.
Your legacy OMS stays in place during rollout. However, over time, as Pipe17 takes on more order routing and logic, the legacy OMS is phased out and replaced with a lightweight, modern Order Operations platform.
Real World Stories: When Legacy OMS Blocks Growth
Well-known fashion brand, Amour Vert, is a clear example of how the right order operations approach creates a competitive advantage.
Before switching to Pipe17, their previous system couldn’t handle inventory across multiple channels. Orders were oversold, stockouts spiked and the team was left to reconcile the mess manually. Every new integration needed developer support, which delayed projects and blocked progress. After implementing Pipe17, the brand eliminated manual reconciliation and launched new sales channels without engineering delays.
By leveraging Pipe17, they now sell from a single unified inventory across 20 different shops, connecting their Shopify POS locations to enable ship-from-store order fulfillment. They’ve a reliable source of truth where none existed before, and have unlocked business-changing capabilities, such as the ability to onboard a new fulfillment center in just 30 days.
The Next Move is Yours
Traditional OMS is failing brands, but operations leaders don’t need to commit to a total re-platform to optimize their systems and accelerate growth across channels. Taking an OMS alternative approach enables you to gradually move away from brittle, centralized workflows while helping them run their businesses with lower cost and greater agility.
Order operations with Pipe17 is built for the real conditions brands face today, adapting to operational shifts as they happen and keeping systems in sync without heavy engineering.
Want to see how OrderOps works in practice? Book a 30-minute Order Operations Assessment and get insights on your current systems issues and how Pipe17 can fix them.
