Buyer’s guide
An order management system sized to how you actually operate
One queue for orders from every channel, per-customer pricing and credit, a clean audit trail, and an API your engineers won't curse.
What to know about order management system
'Order management system' is one of the most overloaded terms in B2B software. On one end you have $30/month tools that track fulfillment status. On the other, multi-million-dollar enterprise OMS suites that route orders across dozens of warehouses. Most distributors need something in the middle — a system where an order is a first-class record with a state machine, a ledger entry, and a webhook, not a row in a spreadsheet.
The question worth asking isn't 'does it do OMS things' but 'does it fit the way my orders actually arrive?' If half your volume comes from a portal, a quarter from reps, and a quarter from your ERP's API, your OMS needs to treat those three paths as one record.
Evaluating tools
What to look for
Ask these of every tool in your shortlist — including ours.
- 1
One record per order, regardless of source
A portal order, a rep-entered order, and an API-placed order should be the same row with the same state machine and the same audit trail. If your OMS routes them to different tables or different dashboards, you'll spend every Friday reconciling.
- 2
Explicit state transitions, not just status fields
Orders move submitted → processing → shipped → delivered (and sometimes cancelled, rejected, returned). The OMS should enforce valid transitions, log each one, and fire a webhook at every meaningful state change. A freeform 'status' column is worse than no column.
- 3
Stock decrements are part of the order transaction
When an order is submitted, the stock decrement and the order row have to commit or fail together. If they can diverge — if your OMS writes orders in one tool and stock in another — you will oversell, usually at the worst possible moment.
- 4
Refunds, returns, and partial shipments are native
Real orders split shipments, get partially returned, and sometimes get refunded to a different method than they were paid. An OMS that forces you to 'cancel and re-create' for any of those has a data model that will bite you.
- 5
An integration surface that grows with you
You will integrate with accounting, shipping, tax, maybe a PIM. Scoped API keys, signed webhooks with rotation, and rate limits on both sides are the difference between a clean stack and a cron-job nightmare three years in.
How Distribu handles it
What you get on day one
One order queue across every channel
Orders from the storefront, the staff dashboard, and the REST API all hit the same queue with the same server-side semantics — stock decrements, tax applies, webhooks fire. You move them through submitted → processing → shipped → delivered from whichever surface you're in.
Order docs →Explicit state machine with webhooks on every transition
Orders move through a named state machine — SUBMITTED, CONFIRMED, SHIPPED, DELIVERED, CANCELLED, REJECTED, plus PENDING_APPROVAL for customer-side multi-user flows. Every transition is logged and fires a webhook. Invalid transitions are refused server-side.
Order lifecycle docs →Atomic stock decrements with the order
Order creation and stock decrement happen in the same database transaction. Two buyers can't oversell the same unit; a failed stock check rejects the order cleanly before any downstream webhook fires.
Inventory docs →Returns, refunds, and store credit without a detour
Customers request returns right from the storefront. Staff approve, receive, and refund — to the original payment method or as store credit that auto-applies on the next order. The stock ledger updates in lockstep, so returned units don't ghost your counts.
Feature tour →A REST API and signed webhooks in the base plan
Nine permission scopes per API key, per-key rate limits, and twelve webhook events with HMAC signatures and zero-downtime secret rotation. Anything the dashboard does, your code can do — no upsell required.
API reference →Frequently asked
What is an order management system (OMS)?
An OMS is software that manages the full lifecycle of a customer order — from creation through fulfillment, returns, and refunds. It sits between your storefront (or ERP) and your shipping/accounting systems, and is the system of record for order state.
Is an OMS the same as an ERP?
No. An ERP (SAP, NetSuite, Dynamics) covers finance, HR, manufacturing, procurement, and orders in one package. An OMS covers only the order lifecycle. Most mid-market companies run both; small-and-mid distributors often run just an OMS plus a focused accounting tool.
Does Distribu handle order splits and partial shipments?
Yes. Orders can be partially fulfilled (shipment-per-line-item or quantity-per-shipment), partially returned, and partially refunded. Each partial action writes its own row in the order's audit trail and fires its own webhook.
How does Distribu handle high-volume API-placed orders?
The REST API supports bulk-create endpoints and per-key rate limits that scale with your plan. Distribu runs on Fluid Compute so order creation doesn't cold-start on a spike. For sustained high-throughput integrations, talk to us — we can size limits to your pattern.
What happens if a webhook delivery fails?
Distribu retries failed webhook deliveries with exponential backoff over 24 hours. Each delivery attempt is logged with its response code and body. Signing is HMAC-SHA256 with zero-downtime secret rotation, so you can rotate a webhook secret without dropping events.
See it in your own tenant
14-day trial, no credit card. Or walk through it with us first — 20 minutes, your catalog, your questions.
Built for
Built for
Small manufacturers
Audited stock movements so finance and production read from the same ledger. Webhooks so your ERP and MRP stay in sync without brittle CSV cron jobs.
Built for
Multi-brand retailers
One catalog, per-brand pricing, shared customer records — plus a REST API and webhooks for when your stack gets opinionated.