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The choice on the table is which gaps to close before peak and which to leave until the season is over. A change to the order flow made in October gets tested by real customers in November. The expensive failures at peak are rarely a shop that goes down. They are orders sold without stock, refunds that take a week and a service queue full of people asking where their parcel is.

Where-is-my-order questions are an order visibility problem

Most peak-season contact about orders comes down to one question: where is my order. Service teams shorten it to WISMO. Each of those contacts is cheap on its own and expensive in bulk, and the cost depends on whether the agent can answer it from one screen. If the order lives in an ERP that the service console cannot read, the agent has to ask a colleague, and the customer calls back.

Salesforce Order Management runs on the core platform next to Service Cloud, so an agent sees the order, the payment, the shipments and any split across warehouses on the customer record. Whether that move pays off outside peak depends on your channel mix and your ERP, which is the core argument in what Salesforce Order Management changes. For peak, the point is simpler. An answer the agent can see is an answer the customer gets in the first contact.

Agents need actions next to the order view

Visibility answers the question, and actions close the case. During peak, the actions that matter most are the ones that used to need ERP access. Before the season, check that agents can complete each of these without leaving the console, because every handover adds a wait for the customer:

Issue a partial refund as an appeasement for a late delivery.
Resend an order that the carrier lost or delayed.
Adjust an order, or split it across fulfilment locations.
Create a return authorisation and refund once the return arrives.
See payment, tax and shipping details on the order itself.

Some of these depend on your fulfilment setup. Where a warehouse or carrier cannot report returns back in time, parts of the return process stay manual. Better to know that in September than in the first week of December.

Shared stock across channels decides whether you oversell

Overselling at peak is a stock problem that shows up as an order problem. Salesforce Order Management can take orders from several channels, such as a second storefront, a mobile app or a marketplace connected through a feed tool like Channable, and check them against one shared stock pool. That keeps availability consistent across channels, so the last unit is not sold twice.

Marketplaces that do not check inventory in real time are the exception. For those, you reserve stock per channel. That protects you from overselling and costs you some availability in your own shop. Set those reservations deliberately before peak, based on how each channel sold in the previous season, and review them every week while the season runs.

Kevin Van der Straeten

Managing Partner

Load-test the order connection against your own peak

The connection between storefront and order layer takes its highest load on the days you can least afford a queue. Salesforce B2C Commerce, part of Commerce Cloud (Agentforce Commerce), connects to Order Management through a standard connection or a high-scale connection. Salesforce built the high-scale option for storefronts that take orders in large bursts. Which one you need depends on your peak orders per minute and the number of lines per order, so check both against the current Salesforce limits and test at peak volume before the code freeze.

Payment belongs in the same test. In most setups, Order Management captures payment when an order ships, so a payment provider that slows down at peak delays shipments as well. How providers handle that load is worth checking when choosing a payment service provider, well before the season rather than during it.

Freeze the order flow before the season starts

Every change to routing rules, refund logic or connectors after the code freeze is a change your customers test for you. Set the freeze date early. Keep a short list of exceptions that only a named owner can approve, and make sure that owner sits with operations and service.

A freeze holds better when a real problem can still be escalated quickly. As a Salesforce Summit Partner, we have weekly calls with Salesforce product management in the US. A blocking bug in the weeks before peak goes straight to the people who can act on it. Through the standard support route, that request often waits.

Measure peak by what customers had to ask

The honest measure of peak readiness is contacts about orders per hundred orders shipped, and the share of those contacts an agent closed in one go. Revenue per day tells you the shop stayed up. Contacts per order tell you whether the order flow held. The same two numbers make the longer case for Order Management and Customer Satisfaction once the season is over.

After peak, review the worst days with operations and service at the same table, then decide what changes before the next season. We stay on board for that review and bring the KPIs agreed at the start of the build, so the next game plan starts from your own numbers.

Explore Order Management

About the Author

Kevin Van der Straeten

Managing Partner

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